On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 11:39:18AM -0700, Greg Schwimer wrote:
Does anyone have any experience with GBIC-based CWDM and/or DWDM optical add/drop muxes (OADM)? I'm presently looking at the Cisco product lines which combines GBICs with passive multiplexors and am curious as to alternative manufacturers and the experiences other might have in these types of products in a metro application.
Yup work fine, simple and relatively cheap. I think the Cisco solution is just rebadged Finisar - Finisar offer a slightly larger range including products which let you put wideband 1310nm under some CWDM grid channels - should be able to take 10GBase-LR on the 1310nm channel. DWDM needs temperature controlled lasers to keep them on their grid (at <1nm vs 20nm for CWDM) which pushes the price up. My major concern with these products is vendor compatibility between GBICs and especially miniGBICs. Our next procurement will include some words about the kit's GBIC slots being vendor agnostic.