Good optical fiber and sFP transceiver type for DIY termination?

You will spend more on the tools to terminate fiber properly for one set of terminations (plus all the times you'll have to redo them to get it right if you don't have experience) than you will on everything else.

Instead you can buy custom length pre-terminated outdoor or armored fiber with pulling socks for much cheaper and the terminations will be perfect. Just trench and run conduit between the two locations. If you're worried it will be a hard pull then it will still be cheaper to hire a contractor to run and terminate the fiber than trying to do it yourself. Proper termination and testing tools will cost thousands.

Just to give you a sense of the kind of money behind getting setup to do terminations:

The easiest termination system to use is the Corning Unicam Termination Kit. This requires Unicam terminations which use a gel layer and pre-polished ends and are fairly costly themselves. The kit runs about $2000 and that is just to do the termination. It doesn't include any test equipment to see if you've done it correctly but is fairly idiot proof. IMHO the terminations are reasonable but not high quality and the terminations can be a bit delicate and prone to separate. I never use this for more than a temporary band-aid personally.

3M Hot Melts are the most durable but also most tedious to terminate and take a lot of practice to get right. Here again you'll be looking at about $2000 for the kit. I'm fairly quick with these for someone who only does occasional fiber work and it still took me over 4 hours to do 96 terminations last time I had to (years ago). 3M also has a crimp style connector that I find can be hit or miss in terms of if the crimp will like the fiber and actually stay on so I personally prefer 3M Hot Melt even though its a bit more termination time since you need to warm up the terminations.

These days I usually go with pre-terminated pigtails and a fusion splicer. A good fusion splicer will run you about $10,000 though.

In terms of the minimum test gear I would want for any terminations I'm doing myself it would be a fiber scope (at least $1,000) and an OTDR (around $10,000).

It might be tempting to go with cheap tools because you will find some out there but without experience you won't know if it's you or the tool that's bad. Usually the tool will be bad and you'll have wasted your money.

Anyway the point is that it's expensive to get setup for. You can expect that a contractor will be a few thousand in labor because of being specialized and the equipment costs.

Alternatively you can buy the fiber pre-terminated for under $1000.

Make sure to run large enough conduit to fit the sock and have more than one person for that long of a pull so you can feed it. You want to be slow and gentle and will want to use cable lube. If you haven't trenched yet try to make it as straight a shot as possible. If you can't dedicate a conduit to the fiber consider using maxcell innerduct.

/r/networking Thread