On 26/Feb/20 18:14, Randy Bush wrote:
so you have to stock both single and multi? hmmm
Optics are dirt cheap. We don't pay the equipment vendors for their flavour :-). That said, stocking MM and SM is cheaper than stocking just SM, because we can reliably predict when/where we shall use either. For MM, it is always on the same floor, within a space of 1 - 10 racks, all nicely pinched together. In the old days, equipment vendors always shipped MM ports before SM anyway. Over 13 years ago, some line cards only shipped with MM for 10Gbps ports for almost 6 months before SM options were available. We had the same issue with our first 100Gbps ports as little as 2 years ago, for MPO cables. For customer circuits, SM pricing can be scoffed at. What is more important to us is that the optics are multi-rate. And even more important now, is that our 3rd party optics suppliers can allow us to code and re-code optics to our heart's content. Mark.