Windstream/Kinetic will soon offer a fiber optic data connection to my address and I’m wondering how this will work. As I (poorly) understand it, the ISP tech will run a drop from the street to my house.
Then, does the connection on the outside of my house continue to the inside as coax or does it remain as fiber until it gets to a modem where CAT 5,6,7 continues to my router?
When AT&T did mine, they added a little box inside my house (some sort of optical terminal?). A thin fiber strand in a very slim cable sheath goes through your wall to that box. That box then connects to a modem (can’t remember if it was coax or ethernet). The modem thens connect to another router, or act as one itself, depending on the model.
It is magical, by the way. Soooo much better than cable. Good time to upgrade to Wi-Fi whatever-number-they’re-up-to-these days.
I was wrong… the terminal itself (the “optical network terminal”, or ONT) IS the modem. They come in both external (mounted on an exterior wall of the house) and internal (inside your room) varieties. AT&T gave me a small internal one, the middle one here:
Other providers may differ. And more complex ONTs (like for a new construction home where everything is served via fiber) may include connections for whole-house coax networking, landline over VOIP, cable TV, etc. There are also bigger units that serve apartment complexes and businesses.
Windstream’s seems to work a similar way: https://www.windstream.com/blog/how-does-fiber-internet-work
It sounds like their ONT just gives you a standard ethernet port to connect to a router of your choice, but it might be worth calling them to verify. The Windstream might look something like this:
(judging from random internet threads that mention this)
Understood.
A big reason that I’m asking is that my house already has coax running to almost every room, and if the fiber ends and coax starts outside of my house, I’ll need to trace the coax to where it terminates inside my house at the computer and router.
That would be my prefered way to do this as there wouldn’t be a requirment to run a separate length of fiber through my house.
Looks like I’ll need to wait until the service is ready to be installed.
I have a box in the basement - it has 2 phone (RJ11?) jacks and 4 ethernet (RJ45?) jacks. The power goes to another box which then goes to the main box – the smaller box is battery backup.
The phone jack is tied to my landline (yes, I still have a land line).
My unit can do wifi, but I don’t have it set up that way – I just have an ethernet cable between the fiber box and my wifi router which is in my office (though my desktop is connected to it via ethernet)
Note that my fiber (and box) were installed by my phone company – they also offer TV in which case I think the box would have a coax connector – I did not choose that option.
Brian
I don’t think the fiber connection itself needs coax — it uses fiber and light signals, after all, whereas coax is an electrical transmission. From the ISP to your neighborhood it’s fiber, and from the neighborhood box to the ONT in/on your house, it’s still fiber. From the ONT to your router it’s usually ethernet, unless you specifically get one that has some sort of internal coax connection.
What is the coax in your house currently used for? If it’s for cable TV, they might give you an ONT with coax outputs, or you might need a separate device to do that. If you’re signing up for cable TV through Windstream as well, presumably they will provide this equipment?
If you’re using the in-home coax for MoCA (home networking over coax), you might need another kind of device (I’m not sure about this) to go from ethernet to coax… something like a MoCa adapter: moca adapter | Newegg.com
I think they’ll usually try to drill a tiny, tiny hole through your wall right next to where your existing router is. The incoming fiber line is VERY thin, like thinner than a headphone cable. If that’s not possible, they can install the ONT anywhere and you can fish a standard CAT 6/7 (definitely go higher than 5 for FTTH) from the ONT to anywhere else. Not sure where the coax in play here… is it for TV or something else?
If you’re getting TV with them too, I’d just give them a quick ring to clarify this situation beforehand to make sure you have the right layout figured out before the install. It’s probably a different topology vs the internet-only FTTH setup that I had.
I’ve been considering AT&T fiber and noticed the equipment is in the home. There’s a little bulkhead box for the entry point but it’s just a passthrough.
I think your coaxial will now be unused.
It was used for TV/Satellite (Dish Network). It’s been unused for a long time now.
Oh. Then it can just stay unused. Or you can use it for MoCA as an alternative to wi-fi or powerline networking. Personally I’d just leave it unused in the walls unless it’s really bothering you. May come in handy someday, if only to eventually replace it by fishing another sort of cable through the same conduit and then getting rid of it.
(Edit: To be clear, the new fiber setup doesn’t need or use any of your existing coax. It can enter the house wherever is convenient for you, basically wherever you want the main wifi router to be. If it’s a big enough house, you’d probably use a wifi mesh anyway, so really the fiber entry & ONT can be anywhere you like that’s convenient and not intrusive.)
I want to use it for this so that an additional fiber line wouldn’t have to be run to my router’s location.
Unfortunately you can’t, unless the ISP has a special ONT that can do networking over coax (which would be unusual).
With a cable modem, the internet signal itself arrives over coax, so they can connect their coax to yours. They can’t do that with fiber because it’s a different sort of connection to begin with. There is no point at which it would become coax, normally.
If they had a external ONT that either has built in MoCA or has space and power for a MoCA adapter of your own, you can use that to transmit the already-converted internet signal through the existing coax into your router room, then use another MoCA adapter to turn that back into ethernet for your router. This is backward from how a cable modem would work, and would be a pretty non-standard hack. It probably also won’t be very reliable (against weather, etc.).
Alternatively, they’d have to rip out the coax and fish a long fiber line through the same conduit in order to reach that room. It’d be a lot of work and I’m not sure if they would be willing to do that… worth asking, I suppose?
Otherwise, if your router room has external walls, they’d probably prefer to drill straight through that.
Edit: Just to be explicit, in a typical fiber internet setup, there is no coax involved anywhere. It goes from fiber straight to ethernet (CAT). So you’d have to jump through significant hoops to try to get it to work with an existing coax network. The ISP would prefer you just pretend that coax network isn’t there, and find them an easy entry point into the house, either alongside other existing cables or where they can drill straight through a wall.
A fiber provider will be strongly disinclined to offer an adapter that relies on a competitor’s dodgy copper. I totally get the motive, as said, I’m considering fiber myself and will have to rearrange a bit. That means reassessing my pole-service utility connections: minus existing telephone wire, minus existing Comcast cable, plus fiber.
Does coax slow down the signal from the street to my router as opposed to running the fiber optic all of the way in? The people at xfinity who have no clue how this works insists it’s done that way.
I think signals travel in a glass fibre and in a copper cable with comparable speeds. Not that a few meters will make a difference.
What about throughput in bps? I realized that’s the question I really was trying to ask.
This page says you can get 10 Gbps even over a Cat-6 Ethernet cable, as long as it it not too long.
Why would they not run the cable all the way into the building?
The MoCA 3.0 standard @Reply mentioned can also get to 10 Gbps, if that is relevant.
They don’t know. I’ve been at their store to find out about cell plans and I think xfinity refuses to train any of their salespeople.
I’ve used MoCA in three houses to take advantage of existing coax, rather than trying to run ethernet cable or trying to get strong wifi coverage everywhere it was needed.
MoCA has generally been fast, inexpensive, easy, and reliable. If you prefer the speed and reliability of a wired connection and have good coax wiring where you need it, I recommend looking into MoCA.
Wait, does Xfinity even offer fiber? If they’re offering fiber to the home, they wouldn’t then convert the last stretch to coax. It’s extra work and complexity for no gain.
Fiber has much higher theoretical output, but that’s more a concern for the ISP’s connections (to other data centers, and dividing bandwidth between many households) than for any one household. Either coax or fiber could carry a gigabit or two without much issue; but fiber can carry many many times that, like thousands of times more. Each strand has incredible bandwidth, can utilize different frequencies of light and miltiplexing, and multiple strands can be bundled together in a big cable. The math is beyond me, but see information - Maximum theoretical bandwidth of fibre-optics - Physics Stack Exchange for an analysis.
But none of that matters to you as a single household. You’re unlikely to be able to get a plan for more than a gigabit or two per second anyway, and either medium could easily carry that from the street to your home. It’s more that fiber and coax are completely different infrastructures for the companies involved and they wouldn’t convert between the two without good reason.
For your own in-home use, where your coax is only used by your own devices and not sharing bandwidth with the ISP’s other customers, MoCA can use all the copper for you exclusively and thus achieve higher bandwidth than what a cable modem network would have (which shares bandwidth with other customers and also with cable TV streams).
It’s not limitations of the transmission media at play here, just the practical installation concerns of different companies.
Now this is interesting.