Hi my friends and I have been playing with the idea of a fiber optic network at lan parties even though our switch is fast enough. but i am wondering if fiber can communicate with ethernet, is it possible to convert an ethernet link to the internet into a fiber-optic signal and send that signal to and from fiber network cards or are fiber nics input signal only, has anyone played with this kind of stuff and have any insight, because we are looking at stuff on ebay, not building a network from all new equipment. thanks
you could but its expensive. fiber in lans is used as it can be put places cat5 cant like near electrical noise not really for speed.
There is no point in fibre unless you are wanting to transfer large amounts of data. GB/Ethernet will do fine for a LAN that you are just gaming on. The cost-benefit for fibre just isnt worth it in your situation!
Possible yes very expensive yes. i spose if you had a huge LAN party IE 300+ peeps i spose there might be a need to use it to connect the hubs and servers. And you own powerstation as well i would suspect. But anyhow doesnt this post belong in the networking forum
It is posible but not needed for something like a lan party. Unless you have a good RAID setup in your computer you can't even use a full 100mb network to it's max between 2 computers. The second thing about fiber is how do split and switch it? The answer in over copper. Dispite this fiber is faster then UTP CAT 5e, but for anything the standart person has there is no need for it.
Fiber has no place at a lan party. it's used for long distance links where the cable will not be disturbed, bent, or stepped on. (eg, buried under ground or in the ocean) def not a lan enviroment. buy some cat6 and a gigabit switch.
I understand that fiber would be useless at lans but it would be nice for file transfers and i found a deal on network cards, can fiber nics operate like ethernet cards ( send and recieve info) like bridgeing teh network connection between an ethernet port and the fiber card? also could an admin please move this thread to networking indtead of electronics thanks
you realise that the vast majority of disk configurations wont saturate a normal gigabit ethernet connection right? you'd need at least 2 fast sata disks in raid 0 at either end to do that
Fibre comes in pairs. One strand for send one for recieve... Dont understand what your on about with bridging though.
i have seen them used at work, you can buy fibre to ethernet converters and just use them on either end.
if you're concerned about bandwidth saturation on a 1gb line between two switches, then just get a 10Gb module for each switch, and make sure you limit the number of connections on each end to 10 1gb lines. if you want more info on the options for networking and a primer on the basics, the Cisco CCNA/ICND exam review is great (covers everything from the absolute basics to vlans) and can be had off of Amazon or at Borders. [for one lanparty we "borrowed" two 24-port switches with 10gb modules from the comp department, no lag whatsoever. (I also built about 75% of the comps in attendance ) all the comps with 590 or 680 boards were able to use teamed lines.]
If you want to play, and the cards are really cheap, then try and get a line on the cable. From what I remember, making the cables is really tough. Yes, with the right software you could bridge the connection on a PC with 2 cards. The problem is that the cables are fragile. An act as simple as stepping on one can break it.
AFAIK, The only difference between copper and fibre is that CAT6 cables have a maximum run of ~100m whereas using fibre you can have a run of up to 3km (typically used for connection between buildings or between floors) There is the possibility of better 10Gbps Ethernet speeds but that is WAY overkill for even the biggest LANs (and VERY expensive)
plus: nobody can fill up a gigabit lan connection using a normal computer. you'd need a ram-disk and expensive LAN card (killernic, or something comparable) on an expensive motherboard (shortly called: server hardware) to realize that... So more then gigabit ethernet over copper from switch to pc is useless. You can choose to use a faster (fiber) connection between switches, because those really can fill that speed. Though Gigabit switches with one (or two for a ring-network) fiber connection(s) are very expensive
we use fiber, but as a backbone network and then use cat5e on the machine to conect to the switch.... its overkill to conect to machine with fiber ( I've tried it at work) its going to cost you too much for any or no benefit over cat6 cable and gig ethernet...... buy yourself a good switch and setup a good server with no lag..... improve the network instead of the infrastructure and you will notice more bandwith.... separate the traffic dependent pc (servers, nas, gameserver) from the ping dependant pc..... this should boost you're network more than any fiber
Definitely separate traffic and use a dedicated machine acting as a server. General rule is if you need to ask about fiber you don't need it for a network. Slightly still on topic: I used to work with a guy that was a fiber optic engineer. He said that fiber is such pure glass, that you could make a window several miles thick and still see perfectly through it.
1GB/s isn't that hard to fill, 120MiB/s isn't out of the realms of possibility any more. Network cards which can push that aren't that expensive any more either, before the advent of PCIe you had to go PCI-X, but I've seen some impressive results using just £25 Intel PCIe cards. I'd avoid fibre though, the cards are expensive, the cables are expensive, and the DIY cable process isn't safe or cheap. If your desperate some motherboards provide a way of bonding there two gig ports together, direct to the other machine you've got a theoretical maximum of 250MiB/s (less protocol overheads).
