You Can Tune a Transceiver, but You Can’t Tuna Fish

You can tune a transceiver, but you can’t tuna fish

Any REO Speedwagon fans in the house? That one’s for you.

You’re a fiber squeezing, bandwidth boosting ninja. Whether leasing fiber over an IRU or maximizing your own, you made the most of the per strand-per mile terms by leveraging WDM filters and smartly utilizing the dark fiber you needed. Instead of one connection over your fiber pair, you’re probably leveraging 40 or even 80 by using DWDM strategies. You’re swimming in bandwidth!

A Business Case for DWDM Tunable Transceivers

Everything about this scenario is ideal, with the exception of sparing. Conventional DWDM transceivers use fixed-wavelength lasers as light sources, and the number of wavelengths in DWDM 50GHz has reached the hundreds, creating a multiplier effect on the number of transceivers required in this solution.

If you are deploying a DWDM channel, you should be sparing at least one transceiver per channel. If you are using 40 channels, you should have, at a minimum one spare for each, per form factor.

If your DWDM SFPPs are connected to DWDM XFPs at the remote side, the necessary spares just doubled. And if there’s substantial distance between your locations, you may additionally need to have spares on-site to minimize downtime.

Freeing Up Capital with Built-In Flexibility

An alternative solution is to use SFPP and XFP tunables for your 10Gb circuit sparing. A single tunable transceiver can be tuned to any of your ITU 100GHz and 50Ghz spaced channels. If your platform(s) support tunable transceivers, then that’s all there is to it. If not, there are ways to get around it.

If your switch only supports fixed-wave, you’ll need external software to have those tunables read as fixed. Integra’s Smart Coder and SmartCoder+ can adjust tunables to the required fixed channel, all offline (no WiFi needed!). This work-around gains you the flexibility you need both in the short-term and long-term.

Even assuming a conservative estimate of sparing 10 percent, per site, per form factor, and a tuning device per site, this solution frees up significant capital compared to full channel sparing redundancy.

So, Keep Pushin’ and let us help you free up inventory dollars while ensuring your network’s uptime. Oh and REO Speedwagon fans…you’re welcome.

For more information on Integra’s tunables and Smart Coder products, talk to one of our optics experts today.