Giga fiber Tap

Fri Nov 30 16:43:04 UTC 2007

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007, Frank Coluccio wrote:
> Unless I'm misreading the requirement, this
> sounds like a job for a Calient or a Glimmerglass
> optical switch, capable of non-intrusive bridging
> and/or insertion. For large jobs, in any case.
>
> A demo of the Glimmerglass device can be viewed
> on the company's "Government Signals Monitoring
> and Analysis" page:
>
> http://www.glimmerglass.com/defense.aspx

This is probably bit more than would be needed for the apparent 
application of monitoring a particular routing point for a LAN.  A
simple passive fiber tap may be sufficient.

An optical switch may be more suitable when you have large numbers of
sources and need to dynamically monitor a subset of different fibers
on a regular basis.  Installing a switch is less useful if you need to 
check a particular fiber on a permanent basis.

Of course, if you already have an "optical DACS" in your network, then
it makes sense to use it instead of installing something else.