Entry level WDM gear? follow-up

Sat May 18 02:18:34 UTC 2013

On 5/10/2013 9:56 AM, Jerimiah Cole wrote:
> On 05/08/2013 09:21 PM, Jeff Kell wrote:
>> Ciena/Cyan/etc are way over our non-existant budget...  what is the
>> going recommendation to throw say 4-8 lambdas over a dark pair without
>> breaking the bank?  :)
> I've used http://www.omnitron-systems.com/ media converters and found
> them reliable.  They've got the filters to do an 8 channel system.

Thanks for this and other responses.  Cumulatively I have some more
information, but also more questions :)

We have an existing fiber pair to location "A" where it is
cross-connected to location "B" and terminated.  It's currently a ~35km
link running 10G-ER optics (1550nm).  We're getting a little less than
-7dBm receive over the link now with standard 10G-ER optics.

We need to connect to another provider at location "A" (also 10G), so
thinking of xWDM from campus to location "A".  Would like to handoff one
lambda on to location "B" to maintain that circuit, and the
new/additional ones would terminate at location "A".

CWDM is obviously cheaper and supports the 1550nm current band (but do
we need to replace existing optics with "tuned" ones to keep things
honest?).

Cisco lists no CWDM 10G optics at all in any form factor, only DWDM, and
they're "really proud" of them based on the list price.

The "tuned" optics have no SR/LR/ER/ZR attributes... so what are their
real distance characteristics?  In particular, can we cross-connect one
of the outputs to the existing location "B" and have the dBm budget to
get there?

This is becoming quite the adventure :) 

Jeff