Fiber Optic Switch, SFP, Fiber Ethernet Converter

 Today, when dealing with the SMB (Small Medium Business) networking products in the “fiber +  LAN” environment, a new idea regarding to this post came out. As there are more and more requirement on combination solution between optical and Ethernet, it would be a great work to create a brief but clear introduction for those common “fiber +  LAN” equipments, such as fiber optic switches, SFP/LC, fiber Ethernet converter (Media Converter) and so on…

Fiber Optic Switch

 Fiber Optic Switch, also named Optical/Fiber Switch, is a switch that aimed at increasing the throughput of data communication between chips by switching from copper to optical signaling.The Fiber Optic equipment enables signals in optical fibers or integrated optical circuits (IOCs) to be selectively switched from one circuit to another.

Fiber Optic Switch

Features (Part)

• IEEE 802.3af power on up to 4 ports 
• 4 10/100 Mbps Ports with AutoUplink™ 
• Optical fiber SC interface of 155 Mbps
• Supports IEEE 802.3x flow control for Full-duplex Mode and backpressure for Half-duplex Mode
• 1K entry MAC address table of the PoE Switch POE31004P with auto-learning and auto-aging
• LED indicators for monitoring power, link, activity and speed

 In one word, it brings fiber connection to multi dwelling units and distribute to various RJ 45 Points.

SFP

 SFP: Small form-factor pluggable transceiver, is a compact, hot-pluggable transceiver used for both telecommunication and data communications applications.
 SFP+: The enhanced small form-factor pluggable (SFP+), is an enhanced version of the SFP that supports data rates up to 10 Gbit/s. SFP transceivers are designed to support SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and other communications standards.

Types

 SFP transceivers are available with a variety of transmitter and receiver types. Optical SFP modules are commonly
available in several different categories:

For multi-mode fiber:

• SX – 850 nm, for a maximum of 550 m at 1.25 Gbit/s (Gigabit Ethernet) or 150m at 4.25 Gbit/s (Fibre Channel)

For single-mode fiber:

• LX – 1310 nm, for distances up to 10 km
• EX – 1310 nm, for distances up to 40 km
• ZX – 1550 nm, for distances up to 80 km
• EZX – 1550 nm, for distances up to 120 km

 Variations of bidirectional SFPs are also manufactured which use 1550 nm in one direction. 1550 nm 40 km (XD), 80 km (ZX), 120 km (EX or EZX)

• SFSW – Single Fiber Single Wavelength transceivers.
• CWDM and DWDM transceivers at various wavelengths achieving various maximum distances 

For copper twisted pair cabling:

• 1000BASE-T – these modules incorporate significant interface circuitry[10] and can only be used for Gigabit Ethernet, as that is the interface they implement. They are not compatible with (or rather: do not have equivalents for) Fibre channel or SONET.

Ethernet fiber media convert

 A fiber media converter is a simple networking device that makes it possible to connect two dissimilar media types such as RJ 45/copper/twisted pair with fiber optic cabling, which support many different data communication protocols including Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, multi-mode and single-mode fiber optics.

Manageable Media converter

 Fiber media converters can connect different local area network (LAN) media, modifying duplex and speed settings. Switching media converters can connect legacy 10BASE-T network segments to more recent 100BASE-TX or 100BASE-FX Fast Ethernet infrastructure.

Technical Specifications