Like many of you I'm sure, I've run plenty of CAT5/CAT6, set up plenty of switches, APs, routers, firewalls, servers, domain controllers, blah blah blah. But now I'm working on a design to run fiber to 26 buildings in midwest suburban town and this is where my knowledge drops off. I got a quote from a cable contractor that does fiber work all over this town and they suggested a route, which I have crudely drawn in green. The green line, including the one spur that will be optional for the customer, is around 13,500 feet.
My question is this, for those of you with experience in this kind of thing: what kind of cable should I run (single mode, how many strands, etc.) and how, physically, is the best way to design this? Instead of one big ring, I was thinking I should make two or three smaller rings and run 24-strand single mode fiber and then "peel off" a pair for each building. If I did that, would that connection be out at the road, on the outside of the building, or inside the building? These buildings get bulldozed and rebuilt sometimes, so I don't want to design a network that can't be reconfigured over time. And maybe my concept is completely off base. How do ISPs like Comcast and AT&T run fiber in a new neighborhood?
I've never done this OSP design kind of work before, and have very little experience working with fiber, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. But it seems to me that if I made smaller rings and had them intersect in two different locations, I could install two cabinets and put backhaul connectivity in each cabinet giving me some nice redundancy. At certain times of year, all hell will break loose if the end users don't have a working network, so redundancy is a must. I can also accomplish redundancy with a cell modem at each building but that won't provide nearly enough bandwidth to keep them happy during a prolonged outage (like if a drunk driver drove over a cabinet or something).
I want to provide 1 Gbps ethernet to each building and will probably have two 2 Gbps connections from two different ISPs and will load balance between them. I don't need help with this part; just the physical plant stuff. TIA!
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