I have a problem. I’ve wanted to get better Wi-Fi coverage in the far reaches of the yard and open up options for fixed wireless internet service. While better coverage would be a bit simpler with some ptp wireless and/or mesh Wi-Fi offerings, there was a lack of power in the places I wanted and needed to put nodes.

Enter my wife with a solution! Our barn/chicken coop hasn’t had power since an unfortunate water line break and the digger broke the power line. This hasn’t been a huge issue as we haven’t needed power out there until now. Now the Mrs. wants to have lighting in the barn for the winter as well as a camera; partly to watch her cute chickens and partly to keep an eye out for predators breaking in. A perfect opportunity and excuse! Since I’ll need a trencher to bury the power line deep enough, I might as well bury some network cables too!

What kind of networking though? Ethernet is pretty simple and I have crimping tools. The downside though is that it’s kind of limited in top speeds. I maybe could get 10Gb going, but that’s not a given because of the distances and 10Gb Ethernet is kind of expensive anyway.

Fiber though has some things going for it. First is the obvious in that we have longer distance and top speeds. Though I only went for OS2 fiber and so I’m limited to 10Gb (20Gb LAGed if I used BiDi modules). Mainly because I didn’t shop around enough to find direct burial MMF for an decent price. It’s likely way more than I’ll need for PoE cameras and extending Wi-Fi and I doubt any internet service I could get would exceed that anyway.

For trenching I went with a Ditch Witch from a local rental shop. I would not really recommend that. Partly because the one I got was really finicky and the neutral was basically non-existent. I don’t know if it was inherent to the machine or just the age/maintenance. But whatever the reason, this made alignment really difficult and basically impossible. When/if I need to bury more cabling, I think I might go with a backhoe instead if I have to do any sharp angles or multiple buildings or go with a EZ Trench.

While I was at it, I also wired up the workshop. There’s nothing in there yet, but due to the walls it has poor wifi signal so its definitely high up on the list of upgrades to come. While I’m not sure what else might get put out there besides maybe wifi AP and camera, I am toying with the idea of putting a phone/intercom in there (and the barn) to make quickly communicating across the yard easier.

This project was very fun and surprisingly quick. The part that took the most time was finding cabling and waiting on delivery of the materials. Trenching took only a couple hours even with all the issues I was having with the machine.

One thing I’ll probably do differently next time now that I know it has long lead times is order custom length multi-fiber cables from someplace like fs.com. I didn’t this time as when I went to order, it was going to take months to get the cables and push the install from summer into late fall.