We just finished moving, and I’m planning to set up a space in our new garage as an office. Unfortunately, there’s no internet in the garage. Solving this required 100 meters of fiber optic cable and drilling through 10 inches of shotcrete.

Video links:

• Odysee
• YouTube
• Rumble

We have gigabit fiber internet service to our house. The garage is about 80 meters away down a hill through the woods. So that leads to a couple of issues.

Fiber

The first problem is how to run the network 80 meters through the woods. That’s a short enough distance to use cat6a for gigabit ethernet, but I went with a fiber optic cable and media converters instead.

I ordered a 100 meter pre-terminated cable assembly. from LANshack.com. The assembly I got was some pretty heavy duty armored cable rated for direct burial, which looks like it’ll surive getting run over rocks and stuff. I found a pair of media converters on Amazon which allow a fiber cable to be used to extend an ethernet network just by plugging in ethernet cables on both ends. The fiber and the media converters ended up costing around $500.

Drilling Holes

The second problem was the fact that both our garage and house are sets of monolithic domes. These are super neat structures, but the problem comes with the fact that they have shotcrete walls. So to run a PVC pipe as conduit through the wall at the house, I need to basically punch a two inch hole through six inches of concrete. A diamond hole saw in a cordless drill ended up working, but it took a while. Same problem at the garage, just with a thinner wall.

Result

There’s now internet in the garage. See the video for the longer version of the story.