So, as they say, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry… But I hope, in this case, they don’t. I have 2 block sheds out of my back garden. One is somewhat upgraded with an insulated roof, proper power feed and some flooring. But not the whole floor. It had a fridge, freezer and tumble dryer in it at one stage. It currently hosts a Wifi AP, switch and Camera from Unifi. Between the house and the shed is a newly installed deck, and under that deck is a trench where I plan to run some fibre optics cable. I purchased 40M of cable from fs.com which is military grade and has 6 pairs on the side. Both ends have 6 LC connectors on them. To start I will be using 2 of these pairs between the shed and the house, so around 20Gb/s, but, ideally a new switch with more uplink speed would be installed on both ends… I was thinking of either Mikrotik’s CSR518-16XS-2XQ or Unifi’s Pro Aggregation Switch.

The Unifi has 4x25Gb ports plus 28 10Gb SFP+ ports. So, that would give 100Gb between the house and CloudShed and would work with all existing servers. It would, however, limit upgrades in the future to faster speeds.

The Mikrotik has 2x100Gb ports, giving me 200Gb between the house and CloudShed, plus leaving me with 4 more pairs to play with in the future. It also has 16 25Gb ports, which are backwards compatible with standard 10Gb SFP+ connections. So, anything currently running 10Gb will still work and gives me future-proofing. It is, however, nearly 2x the cost of the Unifi, plus it’s managed separately from the rest of the house (which is all mostly Unifi).

Neither are cheap (Mikrotik is about $1600, Unifi is around $900) and I would need 2 of them… but… one can dream, right?