We live in Florida, and the lightning is bad here. A tech with the cable company saw signs that the grounding for the cable had been struck by lightning several times and he replaced the grounding connection.
Of course this was after I crawled through the attic and had installed copper ethernet cable.
In the past, I have had many computers taken out by lightning traveling through the copper ethernet so that was my motivator to change things.
Since I use wired networking for performance and also try to keep my wifi usage to a minimal, I wanted to run fiber through the attic, but thoughts of going through the ATTIC again made it a long term plan. The thought of a fairly direct lightning strike taking out my equipment kept increasing my motivation to do this.
I began research of how to even do fiber and decided on using 10GBase-SR SFP+ as the cost is fairly reasonable and the thought of 10gig vs my current 1gig speed was interesting. I ordered the transceivers, network cards, a 4 port SFP+ capable switch, LC to LC fiber OM4 cords, LC to LC optic adapters for wall plate. I tested and everything seemed to come right up, so just the suffering of going through the attic was the last step.
This past weekend, I finally ran a single fiber cable through the attic. It's currently only one fiber connection between my computer room and the media room. Of course, those would have to be at opposite ends of the house!
So my current configuration is pretty nice, there is copper wiring in the computer room linking most 1gig devices. There is one 10gig fiber connection to the media center which then fans out via copper to all devices like game systems, media computer, and tv, I did this by using the media computer as a rerouter to copper switch which then fans to copper ethernet for local devices.
The server and dev computer are also connected via fiber, so a total of 3 10gig fiber so far. I like it! Copying files between systems almost feels like copying on the local hard drive.
While there is some other copper connections trough the attic, the devices they connect to are not capable of fiber, and are fairly cheap to replace. I do see more fiber connections through the attic at some point, but the major expensive devices (as well as consuming my time if a strike occurred and killed things) are now more protected. Typically in storms we unplug the UPSes from the wall as well, and if really bad, start shutting down stuff and unplugging completely.
