Fibre cable physical connections types in Ireland?

IrishWhiskey

I'm about to get CAT6 (or maybe CAT6A?) installed into my house for setting up a home network terminating in my utility room.

At the moment I have Virgin broadband, 1Gb fibre to the home. The fibre cable goes to a box outside my house and then connects into a coax cable that is routed inside the walls of my house and connects to a custom Virgin coax box in my sitting room.

The Virgin coax box then connects to my Virgin router via coax cable. There is also a second power cable for the custom coax box.

Anyway, in the future I might end up upgrading my internet, presumably with a fibre provider, either some kind of upgrade with Virgin or maybe a SIRO connection of some kind.

I don't want the installers to just drill a hole in my wall wherever they can get access from the outside, so I was thinking to myself "why not get a fibre cable installed in my house that goes from the Virgin box outside and leads to my utility room?".

I figured this way no matter what kind of fibre I might get to my home in the future, I will be good to go for maximum convenience and no external drilling into walls and installing into areas that I don't want.

So now that all the preface is out of the way, my question is this: Do all fibre operators use the same physcial connectors for their cables in Ireland?

Ideally I would like to get the cable installed with whatever the specific physical connector used primarily in Ireland is, the thought being that whoever comes to install my new fibre broadband could just connect the external fibre cable directly into the one I have routed to my utility room.

I'm wondering how feasible this is, what kind of drawbacks or caveats I might have to think about. I also was wondering if anyone knew what kind of physical connections each provider in Ireland uses? Is it completely adhoc depending on the area and installation type?

And finally, in terms of SIRO or OpenEir I know that the fibre cable comes into the house from outside, and then one end gets terminated into an ONT box of some kind which then has either an Ethernet, SPF+ etc.. cable/port to connect to the router. So my question about this is, what kind of physical connection goes into the back of the ONT box?

There is a list of different fibre optic physical connection types here for reference.

https://www.blackbox.co.uk/gb-gb/page/27241/Resources/Technical-Resources/Black-Box-Explains/Fibre-Optic-Cable/Fibre-Optic-Connectors

Thanks in advance for any help regarding this as it doesn't seem like something that is well documented online for Ireland so I hoping the members people here might be able to help with this niche topic. Thanks!

heavydawson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058309456/fibre-cable-physical-connections-types-in-ireland

NBI use an SC/APC connector for fibre. More info here:

https://www.al-enterprise.com/-/media/assets/internet/documents/nokia-ont-xs-010x-q-datasheet-en.pdf

eskin

I'm interested in this as well. Virgin are running fibre along the eaves of the houses in my estate at the moment and I would like to run an internal fibre cable from the attic down to the room where the existing coax termination and router box is located - I got a cable from the guys doing the cables which is preterminated on both ends - one end will connect in the box on the facia but would like to know if this cable can be cut to length and a termination put on it that will be suitable for whatever ONT box that Virgin will install ?

If this is feasible then I will route the cable myself as I don't want it running down outside on front of the house and hole drilled in front wall.

The guys running the cables know nothing about the internal cabling of the ONT.

spaceHopper

Run an conduit

My biggest regret in our renovation is not running a conduit to the outside of the house into a comms cabinet.

Oh and put it hdmi from coms box to TV points. That way you can use a cheap matrix switcher. HDMI over CAT-6 is possible but the gear needs very good cat-6 cable and HDBASET convertors that are expensive

Another option in extra power and Ethernet in the attic. Any future box can go there. Have an on/off switch somewhere accessible too for reboots.