Adam ♿Mar 3

Hey @jpm, what kind of fibre and optics do I want? going to do 2-4 ~10m runs.

I am currently getting in way over my head with a 25 gigabit Mikrotik switch but this started as point to point runs.

Think future-proof, not necessarily cheap but of course some of this shit is going to come #StraightOuttaShenzen

Looks like I might have painted myself into a bit of a corner with some "cheap" SFP28 gear, too, but I'm not too attached

Show threadI love this, so IMar 3
@voltagex remind me tomorrow, but in a nutshell go for 10km 1310nm or 1550nm single-mode if it’s not too much more expensive than 850nm multi-mode. You’ll be able to find everything you need on FS.com
Show threadI love this, so IMar 4
@voltagex right, brain engaged, i think, so let's talk high-speed ethernet and the SFP family of optics.
Show threadI love this, so IMar 4
@voltagex (after picking up Little Miss 7 from school early because she fell on her face)
Show threadI love this, so IMar 4
@voltagex Ok, SFPs. Little rectangles, about THAT big, one end goes into network-related thingo, other end goes into cable
Show threadI love this, so IMar 4
@voltagex and that's about it. There's no magic to them, they just translate one signal to another. On the host-side (switch or NIC), it's a high-speed serial connection, and on the cable side it could be anything, limited only by the imagination of a SFP vendor and market demand.
Show threadI love this, so IMar 4
@voltagex In general, you'll only really need to know about SFP, SFP+, and SFP28, and only really need to know about them in the context of Ethernet. QSFP+ and QSFP28 are just 4 SFP+ or SFP28 in a trenchcoat.
Show threadJustified Ancient of MoominMar 4
@jpm @voltagex 40GigE does exist, not just 4x 10GigE but we aren’t talking about backbones here - and in the context of backbones, 40GigE is a bit of a throwback as 100GigE is the go these days
Show threadI love this, so I

@ThermiteBeGiants @voltagex nope, 40GbE is quite literally 4 x 10GbE in a trenchcoat that all transmit/receive at the same time. Most QSFP switch ports can be configured either as 40G (all 4 transmit the same frame at once) or 4 x 10G (all 4 transmit different frames at the same time). If you use the 4 x 10G mode, you can use a quad-breakout cable to send the 4 independent 10G signals to different devices. Now, the cool thing about some QSFP* optics is that they use CWDM inside the module, so all 4 channels are optically muxed into a single single-mode fibre core!

There is, however, a 50GbE SFP56 which is indeed a single 50G channel.

Mar 4 at 4:56amWeb
Show threadJustified Ancient of MoominMar 4
@jpm @voltagex if you want a fun fact, 10GigE WAN (which is slightly slower than 10GigE LAN) is the same bitrate as the old OC-192/STM-64 SDH spec, to allow for equipment reuse