I needed to get our internet connection to our house over a distance of 700 ft (213 m). Running a coax cable from the street to our house wouldn't support getting a strong enough signal. Researching the internet, I didn't find anyone who'd run a coax drop longer than 250 ft.

One of the first alternatives I researched was Ethernet. Cat 6 can support 1 Gbps to 100 meters (328 ft), but you can break it up into multiple runs with switches in between to go farther. I'd need to do at least 3 runs given the distance. The biggest hurdle with this option is that there's no power available for those intermediate switches.

The best option given the distance if I wanted to maintain the Gbps speed was fiber optic cable. FS has a table of speed and distance capabilities for single and multi-mode fiber optic. Single mode fiber can support 1 Gpbs up to 5km, so this seemed like the best option.

I should add that there are wireless options for this distance. However, being the Pacific Northwest, there are a LOT of trees and no line of sight, so it was a non-starter.

At this point, the overall concept was to place the cable modem close to the port, use a media converter to go from ethernet to fiber optic and bring the fiber optic cable to the house. That does leave the problem of powering a cable modem 700 ft, which I'll cover in the next log entry.