[c-nsp] Experience with Fiberdyne labs?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 02:54:04PM -0800, Michael Balasko wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience using Fiberdyne equipment? Were looking
> to build out a small DWDM network and planning on using Cisco DWDM
> GBIC's. I just wanted to get any feedback on their muxes. 

Rest assured that Fiberdyne does not manufacture their own DWDM muxes, but 
then again neither does Cisco. The passive muxes are just commodity parts 
that they churn out in China then mark up 500000000% before they sell it 
to you. Anyone's muxes will work just fine (assuming they're the right 
type, 100GHz ITU grid).

That said, I have yet to see a real world scenerio where it actually made 
technical or financial sense to buy DWDM GBICs (even when the muxes are 
free). By the time most folks get anywhere near exhausting the capacity of 
a CWDM system it is almost always cheaper and easier to manage to just use 
10GE. Even at extremely long ranges 80km 10GE optics cost only 2.6x that 
of a single DWDM channel GBIC, though I'll admit to having a few spans 
between 80km and 100km (*&!# you very much AboveNet) that are keeping some 
of my CWDM GBICs alive well beyond the point when they should have been 
yanked out. The only value of having 32 discrete 1G channels is when 
you're dealing with non-ethernet services like fibre channel, or when 
you're reselling optical transport services. The concept of putting a 
colored pluggable into their systems to speak directly to their providers 
scares and confuses most people, so there isn't much demand for doing DWDM 
GBIC based waves that way...

If you really need to keep a GBIC system alive, you might want to just 
look at picking up CWDM components. There are a lot of networks out there 
who have been ripping out their CWDM systems in favor of 10GE for some 
time, you shouldn't have any trouble finding good deals. As we come up on 
2007, you should probably ask yourself whether you really still want to 
run GBIC based platforms at all let alone sink more money into expensive 
GBICs. Even in complex fiber topologies, it usually turns out to be far 
better to run 10GE rings where every device touches the packet than it 
does to buy the OADMs. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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