[j-nsp] Sources for SFP+ optics

[Saku Ytti]

On (2012-02-23 08:27 -0800), Bill Blackford wrote:

> ok, I shouldn't post something I'm clearly not prepared to provide
> empirical data for. This is what I've heard and I've certainly
> experienced results that support this notion.

I've heard the same, from my router/switch sales people. I'm sure many of
them honestly believe that and don't intent malice.

Buying 3rd party can be done in many ways. One way is to use broken who
uses many sources to find what you need. They can offer very good price and
can rapidly deliver say any DWDM colour for any form-factor.
But they have no idea what they are delivering, it's almost drop-shipping,
will the DDM work? How well the I2C channel works all together? Newer
routers poll I2C aggressively and some SFPs answer too slowly.

Another way is to use shop which does nothing but optics and as such are
subject matter experts. Uses single source for single part-number. Who has
access to various vendors routers and switches and knows before shipping
that it'll work on your gear. These are marginally more expensive than the
brokers when buying one unit at a time, and they might have 7-8 week lead
time (factory lead time) for stuff no on shelf (like certain DWDM colour)


Now I've always been curious, why does this market exist? It would be
excessively trivial to crypto-sign the SFP, maybe some already are. Which
means you'd need to copy the eeprom contents from official optic to make it
work, and you couldn't deliver two eeproms of same value to same customer
(as vendor could prohibit two optics with same code working in same
router).
Yet optic vendors even give you USB eeprommer boxes, where you can
on-the-fly code your optics to fit another vendors router/switches, where
they are seen as official optics.

Possible reasons the market exists

1. Legally required by some customer contracts. Some customer requires 2nd
source?

2. Fear for anti-competitive behaviour?

3. They know some are ghetto enough to go with the copy-eeprom way of
thinking and want piece of the action and are selling crypto-keys to make
'official' optics?

-- 
  ++ytti