Fibre Installations, Ballymena

All in all, the length of the fibre optic cable we installed from the comms cab in the attic of this home, down to the gates was 280 metres!

If you didn’t see the video I posted at the beginning of the week, the reason we used a multi mode fibre optic cable for the IP gate control intercom solution, which runs on ethernet, is because of the distance involved. 100 metres would be your maximum distance to run a Cat6 ethernet cable.

We decided to run ethernet over a fibre optic cable as fibre can go a much greater distance without losing signal and it can also send very fast speeds over a long distance.

The system runs on ethernet so we had to convert ethernet to fibre and back again using some fibre optic media converters. One of these was installed at the comms cab in the house and one at the gates 280 metres away.

Once the cable had been laid through the underground ducting and the fibre optic cable was spliced, we had a working network connection down at the gates to support the intercom system Our client also asked for an additional IP camera to be installed on a tree further back from the gates, looking at the gates, so we also put one of them in.

This IP gate control intercom solution has a camera module with buzzer and a keypad module. It has an internal answering station which can be plugged in and go anywhere in the house as it’s connected to WiFi. It allows our client remote access as when someone pushes the buzzer, it not only notifies the answering station in the house, it also rings his mobile. He can answer it on the screen at home or on his phone, see who’s at the gates, have a 2 way conversation and open the gates if he wants to. This can be done from home or on the other side of the world!

All in all, very happy with how it turned out, as is our client. A lot of work and planning went into this one so it’s nice when it’s all done and everything has went to plan