On Mon, 31 May 2004, Simon Leinen wrote:
I don't think there's 10 GE WAN PHY for the Cisco 7600 yet. It has very cost-effective 10 GE *LAN* PHY (10.0 Gb/s, not SONET-compatible) interfaces though, which I find even more interesting (see below).
Cisco won't release a WAN PHY for a long time and it'll likely be quite expensive since it competes with their other (even more expensive) OC192 stuff. (Yeah, there is most likely a technical reason also, they want to do extensive testing). Also, Cisco is as far as I know now the only player in the market which code SFPs and Xenpaks to avoid impacting their very nice business case of 500+ % markup on optics. I have beta units of WAN PHY Xenpaks directly from the manufacturer, they work nicely in Extreme equipment, unfortunately when putting them into a 7600 it wont even activate them and Cisco doesn't seem very keen on supplying an IOS that doesn't have this limitation so I can test it at all (they've had 8 working days now).
We find that the L1 equipment is getting much cheaper too, especially in the 10 GE LAN PHY space. Think DWDM XENPAKs (or XFPs), which go 70-100 kms and which can be multiplexed and amplified with pretty affordable optical equipment. If you're not interested in carrier-class boxes, "traditional" WDM equipment can sometimes be replaced with active parts that mostly look like GBICs, and passive parts that look like funny cables...
I know of DWDM GBICs, they've been around for quite some time. Just a matter of time until we get DWDM Xenpaks as well. I've also tried the CWDM OADMs which come on some patch cables. Nice if you want to do it in a small scale point to point. The thing speaking against cheaper DWDM stuff is that the transmission people aren't very happy about letting in "uncontrolled" equipment directly into their combiners/OADMs, especially when it comes to controlling power levels etc. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se