Electric service for the two houses are independent of eachother, so no common ground. A fiber line was something I never thought about and would have to learn more about it. As far as usage, we have a 200Mbps plan and we aren't starved for performance now using mostly the same devices all in one house, but will add some extra things in house2 when we move in. We could upgrade that at a later time if needed.
I'd like to run the connecting line in conduit. What size is necessary for a fiber line to pull it from house to house? It would be a fairly straight run with one 45* bend and two 90* elbows coming up at each end.
I want to stay away from wireless since our office is in house 2 and needs a completely reliable connection.
Thanks for the input so far, this is helpful.
Gotcha. With them being so close to each other though, I wonder if they truly have separate grounds or are tied into the same one as contractors do 'take shortcuts'.
Fibre is really easy with preterminated fibre available. I never used the stuff myself either until I got some to play with--very, very simple and aside from being delicate, they're pretty much just like ethernet cables in terms of use. Another plus is that you'd be ready for any faster speeds--2.5/5/10/etc.
If running conduit, I would run no less than 2", especially with those type of bends, which fibre won't like. Make everything 45 even if that means breaking up the 90s with 2x 45 deg. And hell you could even go with a 2.5"-3" conduit if you want.
Another idea would be to run moca over coax, but again that would deal with the grounding issue. The difference is with coax is that you can find very durable direct burial wire so you could save the expense of a conduit. Personally, I still like fibre.
And since you want everything on one network, the Dell powerconnects would be great switches to use on each end. I have several of these I use in unmanaged mode (they have both an unmanaged and managed modes) and they're rock solid even though they can be data center loud (48-port versions). I'd get one 24 port for each house (model 2724) and then connect them up using the fibre and sfps--you'll have a nice number of ethernet ports, a reliable switch, and your fibre media converter (with a second as a backup) essentially in one box for <$30/ea.
And I wouldn't worry about TOS violations. If people read their TOS more than 50% of the users would be in violation somewhere somehow. (Did you servers of any type are typically not allowed? yeah--violation.)