One random guess other than gases of various sorts: If you have the lights on a lot, it's possible you have lighting that is not properly uv filtered somehow.

(It theoretically could be lots of heat/humidity vs certain types of cable jackets, but that would be obviously noticeable most of the time)

The fiber and even the armor itself looks fine in your pictures and I bet the error rate is zero. Outside of bending, i can't see how you could damage the fiber when the armor is in perfect shape. That armor will unravel if you really damaged it. The speed thing is not how fiber works. It's hard to get marginal link enough to generate retries that degrade your speed by 10%. Most of the time either you have full speed link, no link, or so many errors speed is zero. The optics almost always have rx/TX signal strength DDM you can look at

Also did you say you direct buried it in cement? If so it's not rated for that. Direct burial and concrete tight/safe are not the same thing at all, not the least of reasons being concrete is highly alkaline (ph12-13) when poured

The second possibility is that I keep the leftover wall paints (Nippon Paint Vinilex 5000) in the same room and have noticed that much of the solvents have evaporated. It is possible that the solvents in the air might have caused the cable to fail in 3 years. It would explain why the other ends that aren't exposed to the air inside the bomb shelter aren't falling apart.

Some other learnings from this. Buried cabling should always be permanently fixed and attached to a patch panel instead of dangling in the open. That was the original plan but I figured it wouldn’t be an issue. I was wrong. Always measure exact length of buried fibre cabling as they aren’t meant to be stored in loops.

I have a similar problem on my car where the 12v wiring is disintegrating like this because the manufacturer tried to switch to a more environmentally friendly wiring. Now the wire jackets turn to dust at the slightest touch or if they vibrate too much. I'm forever tracking down intermittent shorts in the wiring harness.

Another thing that should not have happened is installing the cable in loops in this way: any 'building' or 'underground' type cable needs to be of the exact length required at the demarcation point, fastened properly to prevent movement and terminated on a proper patch panel (can be a one-port box-type thingy for small setups), from where you use regular patch cords to connect your equipment.

(Loops are definitely allowed though, but that use case is mostly for aerial fiber to enable repair splices, and there are some very specific bend-radius and strain relief requirements, which, again should be spelled out in the cable data sheet)

I bought a big spool of 6 strand Corning stuff a long time ago for various projects, the cost and diameter don't increase much to add some protection lines even if you never imagine using them they can save you a re-pull if you bugger something up in construction.

Speedtests for 10G are complicated and will show low numbers because of all the different TCP parameters and schedulers. Sometimes because peering links of your ISP or the speedtest providers are saturated.

We ran fibre cables in the ceiling when constructing our house. I requested the electrician to shield the cables with some tubing, but he probably thought I was being extreme. We have 9 cables, 2 of them don't work, likely from being bent by mistake or something.

The wiring is intermixed with electrical and ethernet (for cameras) cables, making the process a bit tricky. At least for us we might only have to cut the ceiling boards in a few places to help guide the replacement cables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane#Hydrolysis_and_bi...

...so it is a bit amusing to see "TPU Jacket Features Water, Abrasion Resistance" in the product description. PVC or PE would be far better and more common.

This I don't quite get .. as I understand it "PVC trunking" is a type of cable channeling / ducting.

I do a lot of cable and pipe layout around houses, farms, workshops, worksites, etc. and it's routine to use pipes / ducting / channels to allow other cables to be threaded through after or to replace bad cables.

As much as cable deterioration sucks it should be a relief to have ducting to pull good through after the bad.

It seems like wizardry when you first see it, but actually fusion splicing fibre is not hard at all once you’ve done it a few times.

The most important part is the cleaving, always use a high quality cleaver.

Chances are very high the fibres themselves in the cables are absolutely fine, they are remarkably resilient given their size.

It's not clear who "FS" is. A reseller? A manufacturer? They seem to be in Singapore. There's no excuse for the external plastic sheath disintegrating. They must have formulated the plastic wrong. The terms specify a 30 day warranty.

Here's a catalog of real mil-spec fiber optic cables.[2] This is overkill for home applications; you put these in a fighter jet.

In between are Telecom Industry Association compliant fiber optic cables. That's what telcos use. There are US manufacturers with real plants and addresses.

[1] https://www.fs.com/products/70220.html

[2] https://www.glenair.com/catalogs/fiber-optics.pdf

Plastics degrade like this in sunlight due to UV.

If you put plastic storage bins outside, in a short time picking them up will usually cause them to shatter in your hands.

As a sort of cautionary tale - PEX (plastic) plumbing is quite interesting. It is almost like the fiber-optica cable of plumbing. It is really easy to install without welding and can be snaked through walls easily. However, it comes in lightproof packaging and is not to be left exposed to sunlight - otherwise it must be discarded. Holding back 100psi of water requires strong bonds.

Note that this UV exposure might have happened before you installed it. It could have been sitting in the sunlight at a distributor or depot or as a second-hand cable. It could also have been in the sunlight in your house before you pulled it.

Years ago some electronics sensors were replaced and started having problems. I came to realize it was a voltage drop with the new increased load. I was able to pull in new larger wire by using the old wire as the puller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grade

It's just a weak pander to people's weak egos. Freedumb, if you will.

On the other hand, when a product is designed and manufactured to sell to a military, it's going to be expensive, and that extra cost isn't going to quality or capability, it's going to compliance. You're more than likely paying extra to get something using some old and outdated technology, that includes paperwork to prove that it's only built using the approved old and outdated technology.

Is one supposed to send it back for a refund and order the much thinner, less-durable cable? Or is perhaps the landscape not as black-and-white as your "this is automatically snake-oil"?

Anyone who thinks the triggers listed as MIL-SPEC from, say, Geissele here:

https://geissele.com/triggers.html

aren't totally fine is out of his mind. They're amazing triggers, widely used and loved.

And they don't say which specs its passing (at least not on the main page): it's just MIL-SPEC.

As a sidenote my very best laptop passes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-810 but most people will just say it's "military grade" or "MIL-SPEC".

Guess what? Its screen never broke overnight like the one of my MacBook M1 Air did (the infamous "bendgate").

I can bend my LG Gram's screen and it's keeps working fine. I can let it drop. Friend who sold it to me stepped on it when he woke up once.

There's a very big difference between saying: "There are shady vendors" and saying "Military specs do not exists and it's impossible for consumers to buy items passing military specifications".

Yes, there are dishonest vendors.

Yes, military specs do exist.

And, yes, it's possible for consumers to buy products passing (and even surpassing) actual military specs.

"Military grade" is generally shit. It's built down to a price, manufactured the cheapest possible way, so they can get the lowest possible tender submitted. Bonus prize if the manufacturer is owned by either someone already in government, or with close ties to someone in government.

The only "military grade" devices I own are some woefully unsuccessful radios, which failed in the market because they were actually good - easy to use, reliable, and easy to repair - which made them about 5% more expensive than the cheapest option which was made by a company part-owned by the government and part-owned by someone who donates heavily to the Conservatives.

Military grade snake oil?

When I see "military grade" I assume overpriced $30,000 hammer

Honestly, this writeup is… weird? Dude doesn’t know you can terminate fibre at home with like $50 of gear?

I had the fucking fox attack a freshly laid 500 meter line, literally the day before I was going to stuff it in conduit and bury it. Didn’t just break the fibre, she (I know this fox, well) chomped it into pieces, hauled on the exposed Kevlar, generally had a party.

Did I despair? Did I launch a baby complete with bathwater into the sun?

No. I bought a cleaver, some alcohol wipes, some stripping pliers and a whole bunch of mechanical terminators.

Needn’t have worried. Repaired it, outdoors, first attempt, in the rain, and have since buried it - no problems five months on.

I have issues with the PVC-jacketed cables under the bonnet of my nearly-30-year-old Landrover, where the plasticiser has been baked out of the insulation and they've gone brittle. Worst affected are the wires to the fuel injectors and the lambda sensors, presumably because the former are at the top of the engine and get reflected heat off the bonnet, and the latter because they're near the literally red-hot exhaust downpipes.

That's okay for an old vehicle that you'd expect to repair, though.

I've seen the same problem in three-year-old Toyotas, and that is Just Not On.

How exact is exact? :-) I once had to reterminate some fiber that was cut and terminated to exact length, which means there was literally two centimeters from the wall to the connector. I literally had to squeeze the fiber splicer up against the wall to have a chance at splicing on new pigtails, but I had two mis-cuts and I was hosed. :-)

This hasn't been my experience with fiber entrance cables terminated by ILECs, Spectrum, and Lumen. They typically leave a significant service loop bound to the cable ladder or backer board-- usually 15-20 feet.

Definitely learnt it the hard way this time. You're right that buried cables should be exact in length and fastened to a patch panel. I'll probably look into better conduit design as well for the next time (in 15 years?). Having shared conduits means I would risk damaging other cables if I tried to pull a new cable through.

But yes, agreed, a lot of "Er... why would you do it like that?" bits.

This is awful advice I would discard immediately. It's poor practice and against code.

When pulling cable, especially fiber, the ends of the cable should be able to reach the fathest corner of the room. Excess cable should be in a service loop, properly secured to a wall, and terminated on a patch panel. Both ends of the cable should follow this rule. That means you're typically pulling cable that's 15m longer or more, depending on the room and configuration.

NEVER buy and pull cable that is the exact size. The cable literally comes from the factory looped up, it's designed to be looped (watch bend radius).

>Loops are definitely allowed though, but that use case is mostly for aerial fiber to enable repair splices

Again, awful advice that's against code. Underground fiber must have service loops at both ends, and must be terminated to a patch panel.

The second thing is that domestic buildings usually do not come with a consistent ground plane. I worked in a 1960s build purpose made for mainframes and we had ~48v floating between racks at either end of the building and had to do a shitload of work to reground the building, in the 90s (-we were decommissioning an IBM 3033 and deploying a secondhand cray1) the point being somehow, God knows how, prior rs232 serial wiring didn't care and the ground plane for the mainframe was fine at the time. Pre Ethernet this stuff maybe just passed code.

I suspect people who build their own home to some spec acquire these theories. Data comms? Not much reason tbh unless you're pushing a lot more data than normal.

Also, not needing to rerun any cabling if we want to bump up speeds in the future, you just change the laser module on either end. These should be good to >100x current speeds. Not the case with copper.

25GBASE-T and 40GBASE-T were standardized 10 years ago, but there are still basically zero products available with support for it. The datacenter market just wasn't interested and chose to use fiber and DAC instead. Worst of all: it requires Cat8 cables and is limited to 30 meters. This means it can't reuse existing cabling, and doesn't have the reach for many home applications - OPs blog post mentions the longest run in their apartment being 55 meters.

Combine that with the general death of wired networking for home & office use, and it is extremely unlikely the market of hardcore tech enthusiasts is big enough to warrant massive investments into developing some kind of 25G-over-Cat6-for-100m standard.

10G is pretty much the standard for high-end gear these days. This means any kind of future-proof setup needs to be prepared for a future upgrade to a fiber-based technology.

(speeds: 100 gig today, but faster speeds are coming.)

Ethernet runs on many mediums, as well as over the ether.

(He’s gone, plaid!)