Fiber vs Copper

[C_roe]

I was wondering what is going to get me a petter ping: fibre with 25.000 kbit/s upload or copper with 50.000 kbit/s.

 

[Skiiwee29]

Fiber will get you the lowest latency. 

[dalekphalm]

38 minutes ago, C_roe said:

I was wondering what is going to get me a petter ping: fibre with 25.000 kbit/s upload or copper with 50.000 kbit/s.

 

There are a lot of factors to consider, but assuming all other factors are equal, Fibre tends to have the lowest latency.

 

Though if your upload over "copper" is 50,000 kbit/s, then that's probably hybrid Copper (Also known as FTTN - or Fibre to the Node), so the copper line just runs down the block to the junction box (the "Node"), and which point a fibre line runs the rest of the way to the ISP's network anyway. With these FTTN networks, your latency is gonna be pretty similar (though still possibly higher) than Fibre. But it probably won't be a huge difference.

[Mikensan]

I assume you have one or the other solution now (assuming it's copper). Whatever your cable modem is plugged in to (router or directly to a PC) look at the ip information and note the gateway. Then just ping it and check the latency. If you're under 10ms then you're golden.

[iamMINT]

Yes- I agree with a lot of this. But, one of the things you can also argue for Fibre is that it's not going to fry your network if you have electricity problems like Copper will, it's not gonna catch on fire, and it's going to generally last quite a bit longer than Copper will. I'd recommend you put fibre in as many important parts of your network as you can, and connect everything else through Copper if there's a small budge. 

[dalekphalm]

5 minutes ago, JohnBRoark said:

Yes- I agree with a lot of this. But, one of the things you can also argue for Fibre is that it's not going to fry your network if you have electricity problems like Copper will, it's not gonna catch on fire, and it's going to generally last quite a bit longer than Copper will. I'd recommend you put fibre in as many important parts of your network as you can, and connect everything else through Copper if there's a small budge. 

This post doesn't necessarily apply. If he's using a home setup for his network, there's literally no reason to have Fibre inside the LAN - the cost isn't worth it, and frankly, the durability and longevity of copper for LAN networks is quite robust.

 

Also the risk of your copper based network catching fire, or even getting damaged at all, is not very high. Perhaps in some countries with unreliable power grids, but most shouldn't ever have an issue.

[iamMINT]

21 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

This post doesn't necessarily apply. If he's using a home setup for his network, there's literally no reason to have Fibre inside the LAN - the cost isn't worth it, and frankly, the durability and longevity of copper for LAN networks is quite robust.

 

Also the risk of your copper based network catching fire, or even getting damaged at all, is not very high. Perhaps in some countries with unreliable power grids, but most shouldn't ever have an issue.

Well- that changes it a bit. If it's a home network then I can't really endorse the added speed and reliability that Fibre provides over Copper. I was just putting those points out there for anyone wondering about it for bigger networks.

[dalekphalm]

8 minutes ago, JohnBRoark said:

Well- that changes it a bit. If it's a home network then I can't really endorse the added speed and reliability that Fibre provides over Copper. I was just putting those points out there for anyone wondering about it for bigger networks.

True - some larger businesses may feel the need to use Fibre as backbone between switches, etc.

 

At work, we use private fibre lines (They're running at 1Gbps but are capable of 10Gbps or possibly more) in between our branch locations throughout the city. Internally at each branch though we're using Cat6a at 1Gbps between all equipment. We may eventually upgrade internally to 10Gbps, but the equipment costs are pretty high so that won't be happening for a few years at minimum.

[iamMINT]

4 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

True - some larger businesses may feel the need to use Fibre as backbone between switches, etc.

 

At work, we use private fibre lines (They're running at 1Gbps but are capable of 10Gbps or possibly more) in between our branch locations throughout the city. Internally at each branch though we're using Cat6a at 1Gbps between all equipment. We may eventually upgrade internally to 10Gbps, but the equipment costs are pretty high so that won't be happening for a few years at minimum.

Yeah, exactly. Though as an instructor of mine put it- you want to fork the bill on getting Fibre for those essential switch to router and all of your other networking connections due to the fact that if you have any large electrical failure it won't catch on fire or damage your equipment, and it will also last longer and give you more uptime- along with that availability you mentioned that it brings you.

 

Though, basically none of those things are stuff you're going to have to worry about for home networks.