10Gbps network but cheap

The problem #

The apartment I currently live in is rather oblong with ethernet already wired in in a straight line through the apartment with sockets in multiple rooms.
This includes the place where the router sits and the room where my homelab lives.
My hobby room is unfortunately next to the room with the homelab with no ethernet sockets.

The solution #

Since I spend a lot of my time in my hobby room, I need good internet there. I tried power line, but that didn’t work well as expected.
I then bought CAT6 ethernet cable and pulled it in the wall right next to the wiring for the outlets and light switches. I know this is technically against regulations, but it worked pretty well for quite a while. It just looked a bit weird with an ethernet cable coming out of the power outlets.

Becoming a problem again #

In switzerland the electrical installation of a building has to be checked periodically to ensure a basic safety standard.
For residential homes this is 20 years. As luck would have it this check was due a bit after a year after I installed the dubious ethernet line.
To avoid trouble I pulled out the ethernet wire prior to the check.

This unfortunately left me then with no useable internet in my hobby room.

The better (current) solution #

After the check was done I thought about pulling the ethernet cable back in, but was not too sure if I wanted that, since it wouldn’t be more legal now than a year ago.
The regulations I was in conflict with say that signal and power wires must not share the same conduit inside the wall.
But what if I have a signal wire that is not conductive? 🤔

A big inspiration was a blog entry from Michael Stapelberg who installed 10G ethernet in his home with fiber optics.
I was surprised on the prices, since it seems to be quite affordable. Because I didn’t want to replace the whole ethernet wiring in the apartment I decided to only do a single point to point link between my pc and the homelab in the other room, just as I had it before with the ethernet cable. Since the server is running 24/7 anyway I could even get away without a 10G capable switch, if I setup a network bridge to go from copper to fiber in the server.

After a quick shopping spree on Aliexpress I got myself the following:

Installation #

With a lot of confidence in my future first fiber splicing capabilities I cut the cable in two, pulled one end through the conduits, where the ethernet cable once was.

Splicing #

After watching a few videos on how to use a fiber cleaver and what to look out for i tried my first dodgy fiber splice with no professional equipment.
I checked with my phone camera (and not my own eyes!) which of the fibers was RX and which was TX and stuffed the matching ends into these hand splicers and after a few tries I got a connection.

Horray it works! 🎉

To make it last a bit longer I designed a 3d printed “splice box” to fixing the bad splice job in place and to make it a bit more rugged.