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Plastic optical fiber at home: does it really improve the connection?

Plastic optical fiber is one of the best options to bring the Internet connection to any place in our home, although it is also the most expensive option. This technology allows us to pass plastic fiber optic cable through electrical conduits, so it complies with ICT2 telecommunications infrastructure regulations, and we will not have any type of problem with interference, crosstalk, etc. Today we are going to explain to you if really improve the internet connection in your homeand if we recommend you try it.

Main features

Plastic optical fiber is a technology that allows us to wire our house and obtain 100% of our Internet connection, without performance losses as occurs with other technologies such as WiFi repeaters, WiFi PLCs and even with some WiFi Mesh systems. Below, you can see the strengths of this technology:

  • reliability: POF fiber allows us to send and receive data without any type of packet loss or interference with electrical wiring, so we can pass this type of wiring through the same conduits as electrical cables to take our connection wherever we want. Because it transfers information through light, it does not cause any type of interference to nearby devices.
  • Speed: Currently there are POF fiber kits that allow us to have speeds of up to 1Gbps Full Duplex, this means that we can download and upload data at a speed of 1Gbps simultaneously. This is because the fiber cable actually has two, one for transmission and one for reception, the same cable is not used for upload and download.
  • Stability: Another point in favor of this type of connectivity is stability, and that is that we are going to have a really low latency in our local network, less than 1ms. Another very important aspect is the jitter (the latency variation), in this case the jitter is close to 0ms so it is perfect for online games or video calls.

POF fiber is capable of complementing the Ethernet network wiring in your home, if your home is already wired, although generally this type of technology is installed in homes where there are no Ethernet network outlets. We must remember that any home in Spain built after 2011 has mains sockets in the living room, kitchen and bedrooms. POF fiber cable has several advantages over Ethernet network cable, below you can see two key points:

  • reduced size: the size of the fiber cable is 2.2mm x 4.4mm (it actually has two cables, one for emission and one for reception).
  • Flexibility: POF fiber is very flexible, allowing it to be inserted through existing ducts without too many problems. Network cables are quite a bit stiffer, especially Cat 7.

As a negative point, you should know that POF fiber is expensive, very expensive. A basic KIT with a Gigabit transmitter device (which connects to the home router) and a receiver (with 3 Gigabit Ethernet ports) to connect several devices by cable, is worth about €216.

If you want a somewhat more advanced KIT, made up of a Gigabit transmitter device, a Gigabit receiver with two POF ports and another Gigabit POF receiver, it is worth around €379. We must bear in mind that we will only provide cable connectivity, then we will have to put the WiFi.

As you can see, POF technology is really interesting, but today it is really expensive, almost prohibitive, and our advice is to first see if it is possible to run an Ethernet network cable in your home, and leave POF as a last resort. .

Does it really improve the connection?

This technology allows us to take the Internet connection to any place in our house without losing performance, that is, if we have 1Gbps of FTTH fiber in our router, we can take this same speed to any corner of the house. Only Ethernet network cable is capable of providing this same lossless performance. Neither high-end PLC devices nor the best WiFi Mesh are able to come close to the reliability and performance of cable, be it POF or Ethernet.

The network cable is much cheaper than this technology, but in many houses it is not possible to run the cable to all the rooms because there are no free conduits to run the cable, and running it through the electrical wiring conduits is a bad idea. , if you intend to try it, buy Cat 7 S/FTP cable so that it is as protected as possible against external interference.

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