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100g cFP Health Check

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100g cFP Health Check

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  • Author: Jean-Marie Vilain
As the deployment of 100G links continues to gather steam, the demand for increased bandwidth is at an all-time high and network operators must face signifi cant challenges. Some of these challenges have been well-documented in the past and are now understood by most. However, there is one aspect of 100G technology that is too often overlooked when discussing link deployment: the CFP optical interface. The optical interface is based on parallel optics transmission through which a number of wavelengths (usually 4 or 10) is combined on the same fi ber pair to form the 100G rate. This functionality is handled by the CFP optics at both ends of the link. This is very different from 10G transmission, which uses serial transmission with a single wavelength to carry the full line rate. At the moment, the technology behind the pluggable XFP optics used for 10G interfaces is very mature and stable, resulting in a product that is extremely reliable and quite inexpensive. By contrast, 100G CFP technology, which is much more complex than 10G XFP, is still in its early stages and does not yet produce consistently reliable optical interfaces.

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