I appreciate all the responses so far. Indeed, the customer handoff side of the equation is where I’ve been having trouble finding options. The Cisco (formerly Accedian) solution was one I hadn’t seen in my searching, so that at least gives me one competitive option to the Adva. From what I’ve found and what I’m hearing, I think everyone is correct that much like 40Gb, there just hasn’t been as much call for 25Gb handoff at customer demarc outside of the datacenter instead of jumping up to 100Gb ports. Before this search I hadn’t looked hard at 25Gb for anything other than in our datacenter, so I didn’t realize that also like 40Gb, ZR options in 25Gb were relatively new and still not common. Looking at higher speed PON options is an interesting thought, but I imagine it’d be a hard sell for this current use case as they expect dedicated fiber, not that we couldn’t use PON with each site being a home run back to the aggregation site, but that just feels wrong even if it would technically work, haha. I may look into that route a bit more just to see how it might stack up cost and feature wise, and it may be that we decide to roll out higher speed PON for other endeavors from that research. John Stitt Sent from my pocket CRAY-1 On Nov 25, 2024, at 9:30 PM, Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote: On 11/26/24 02:15, Jesse DuPont wrote: Have you looked at whitebox/disaggregated solutions? For example, IP Infusion's OcNOS running on UfiSpace hardware (something like S9500-22XST) will provide the port speeds you're looking for, MEF compliance, and Sync E if you need it. 1U routers that support 25G have been on the market for a little while now. I don't think this is the issue. What has been lacking is a Layer 2 25G demarc. box, and Adva are just about the only vendor who have had one for some time, as the OP mentioned. Outside the data centre, the primary customers for 25G has been mobile operators. With 100G-ZR+ coherent now starting to ship from next month, I suspect this will put 25G RAN backhaul under a bit of pressure. I do think that for Metro-E services, there is a use-case for 25G, especially now that cheap, Broadcom-based routers are shipping with 25G ports. I'm just not sure plenty of MEF-compliant Layer 2 demarc. options exist outside of the Adva number. Mark. CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. If you are not expecting this message contact the sender directly via phone/text to verify.