[j-nsp] 2.5 gig SFP modules?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 04:05:28PM -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> Has anyone tried to use 2.5 gig SFP's with Juniper M-series as a drop 
> in replacement for regular 1 gig SFP's?  The goal is to be able to 
> have a 2.5 gig link between an M10i and an M120 over a regional 
> optical network.  Does this sort of thing work?

If you put them into an OC48 card, sure. Multirate means the SFP itself is 
capable of operating at multiple speeds (to support 1G/2G FC, OC48, and 
its increasingly common to find new models that support 4G FC as well). 
This doesn't make your 1GE card operate any faster, it just means you can 
reuse that same SFP in an OC48 card (which helps lower costs).

Of course it would be remarkably easy for Ethernet to be extended to 
support higher data speeds without any real change in the structure or 
encoding, just like FC has managed to go from 1G to 2G to 4G with the same 
backwards compatible ports. Unfortunately the IEEE has its collective head 
so far up its collective ass that nothing this useful will ever be 
standardized, but there are actuall some folks (like Broadcom) making 
non-standard "2.5 Gigabit Ethernet" products for certain applications. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)