Who actually ships an 80 km BiDi XFP for 10 GbE over a single strand
We have a dark fibre span of roughly 80 km where the owner will lease us exactly one strand - a second core is either not there or priced like a small building. Both ends terminate on chassis with XFP cages, and the service on top of it has to be 10 GbE. So what I need is a single-fibre BiDi XFP with enough budget to survive the span, and I am having a hard time finding anyone who actually ships one.
- ~80 km of single-mode, one leased strand, no second core available
- 10 GbE end to end, no option to run it slower
- XFP cages both ends, no SFP+ and no SFP fallback
- Single-fibre BiDi optic, budget has to cover the full span plus splices and connectors
Where I am after a week of catalogue reading:
span ~80 km, one leased strand
line rate 10 GbE
form factor XFP only, both ends
need single-fibre BiDi
catalogue hits 80 km single-fibre parts exist - all of them gigabit SFPWhat I have already done:
- Went through the simplex/single-fibre product lines of the vendors I could find: the 80 km entries are all 1G SFP
- Asked two distributors; both came back with gigabit simplex parts and a shrug
Does anyone actually run 10 GbE over a single strand at this reach, and whose XFP is it? Or is the honest answer that the single-fibre range stops at gigabit and I should be pricing something else entirely?
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Comments 5
Transition Networks is the one catalogue I know that pushes single-fibre out that far - their simplex range reaches 80 km at roughly 24 dB, and there are a couple of entries beyond it.
Caveat: I have nevre had those exact parts in my hands. Pull the datasheet and hold it against your own measured loss before you order anything.
Running two FiberWorks single-fibre links here - 1310/1550 nm pair, DDM on board, rated 80 km at around 26 dB. Both have been up without incident since they went in, and the diagnostics have read sanely the whole time, which I cannot say for every third-party optic I have bought.
Nothing above gigabit from them in my racks though, so that is as far as my experience goes.
Both of those suggestions are gigabit single-fibre SFPs. The question was 10 GbE in XFP, and neither vendor carries that in the simplex range as far as I can see, so we are answering a question nobody asked.
I have walked into it myself. A single-fibre BiDi catalogue can be deep at 1G - every reach, DDM, the lot - and completely empty at 10G, while the search filters happily return the giggabit parts for "80 km BiDi" because the reach matches even when the form factor and line rate do not.
That is exactly where I keep landing, and thanks for saying it plainly. Both chassis are XFP only - there is no SFP+ cage to fall back to and nothing in the budget for swapping line cards to work around an optic.
I went back through both catalogues after the suggestions above. The single-fibre entries stop at gigabit in each of them; the 10G side has nothing simplex at anything like this reach. At tihs point I am treating "the part does not exist in this form factor" as the working answer and starting to look at what else could carry the service over one strand.
If the optic genuinely does not exist, the money goes into active gear on the span instead. We had a 115 km gigabit problem and solved it outside the cage: a two-port line driver in a box of its own, Transition Networks, pushing an LX12 long-haul wavelength across some 110 km, with 1000BASE-SX presented to the Catalyst 6509 at each end. MRV and Metrobility got priceed alongside it.
The sums came first. G.652 at 1550 nm costs about 0.2 dB per km, every connector adds around 0.5 dB, and the span as built landed near 22.5 dB against the roughly 32 dB those LX12 optics carry - real headroom, not a link that only works on a cold day.
That was gigabit, so it does not answer your 10G question, and I have not repeated the trick at 10G either. What does tranfer is the order of work: get attenuation and splice quality measured on the strand before you argue about which optic to buy, because at this reach the glass decides the outcome first.