Chatsworth, Calif.’s Canoga Perkins used last month’s ComNet show in Washington, D.C. to unveil its newest fibre-optic extension product.
The EdgeAccess Gigabit Ethernet Media Converter Model 9120 is designed for installation into Canoga’s 9101 chassis, but is also available as a standalone product for desktop or wall-mount installations.
When installed in the 9101 chassis however, the 9120 is Network Equipment Building System (NEBS) Level 3-compliant and it can co-exist with Canoga’s 8829 10Mbps and 9119 100Mbps Ethernet converters.
The company says it designed the 9120 to extend the life and investment dollars, as well as the extension capability, of the 9101 chassis.
According to a release issued by Canoga, the 9120 is suited for the long-distance extension of gigabit local area networks (LAN) segments. The company described a typical installation as two 9120s being deployed between two gigabit switches. The gigabit switches would in turn be connected to 10/100 Ethernet switches which are attached to the desktop.
Bill St. Arnaud, a senior director at Canarie, Canada’s Internet Research Institute, said the 9120 media converter will likely be marketed to groups deploying their own metropolitan- or wide-area networks with customer-owned dark fibre. Canarie uses similar products offered by Canoga’s competitor NBase Communications, also of Chatsworth, Calif.
“Where we (would) use it is, for example, a school board that has dark fibre, you put on the gig-E transceiver at the school’s LAN and it goes 40 kilometres to the wavelength division multiplexer (WDM) in a central school board office,” St. Arnaud said. “As more and more municipalities and schools deploy fibre networks, this is an ideal thing for driving the fibre.”
St. Arnaud was not immediately impressed with Canoga’s assertion that the 9120 can extend gigabit segments up to 40 kilometres over single mode fibre, or multi-mode gigabit segments up to 70 kilometres over single mode fibre.
“We’ve got products that go further than that,” he explained.
Richard Cunningham, a Las Vegas, Nev.-based senior analyst of optical networking with Cahners In-Stat Group, said the fibre-optic extension market is growing as users become disillusioned with the bandwidth offered by their telephone company.
“Ultimately, you’re going to see a lot of gig-E and 10 gig-E because all those people at the bottom of the network who are hooked on to ILECs and CLECs (incumbent and competitive local exchange carriers) aren’t going to be satisfied with T-1 service very much longer,” Cunningham said. “They’re going to want more speed.”
Canoga says the 9120’s extension port options include 1310 nanometres (nm) on multi-mode/single mode (MM/SM) fibre and 1550 nm on SM fibre. The 9120 also allows user to enable or disable various features, including link loss forwarding, remote fault, and link loss echo alarms.
A primary application is the interconnection of 1Gbps enterprise switches and service provider backbone networks, using Canoga’s fibre-optic-based simple network management protocol (SNMP) manageable Universal Chassis System (UCS).
For more information, see the company on the Web at www.canoga.com.