LAN and WAN Transmission Extension with FS Media Converter

Background

Taking advantage of the legacy copper cabling system while getting Ethernet to longer distances for coping with expanded business volume becomes a commonplace and cost-effective scheme. FS collaborates with a large international nonprofit organization on a transmission distance extension solution to rebuild the LAN and WAN architecture.

Challenge

The customer wants to extend the transmission distance to 1200-1300 feet while splitting a fiber pair for both LAN and WAN, otherwise, it is necessary to set up two additional switches and create VLANs.

1. An OM4 fiber pair has already been deployed in the backbone network, which is expected to be separated by BIDI transceivers for running LAN and WAN simultaneously. While the existing single-mode BIDI SFP transceivers cannot work on the multimode OM4 fiber, and additional multimode BIDI transceivers are not in view.

2. The separated fiber pair needs to be jointly connected to the LAN and WAN devices without crosstalk.

Solution

1. A pair of OM4 mode conditioning patch cables (MCP) and LC to LC OM4 simplex fiber optic adapters are needed to connect the existing OM4 fiber and single-mode BIDI transceivers, otherwise, differential mode delay (DMD) will be caused, resulting in reduced bandwidth over distance. In this case, MCP can upgrade the hardware technology without bringing additional costs of renewing the optical fiber equipment, improving the optical signal quality in data transmission and extending the transmission distance.

2. A pair of media converters with two RJ45 ports are deployed to connect the fiber and copper links. The SFP port is plugged with 1000BASE BiDi SFP transceiver, and the two RJ45 ports are for LAN and WAN devices respectively. The two media converters can not only achieve photoelectric conversion but also support port isolation for running LAN and WAN simultaneously, so as to avoid crosstalk. Featuring port isolation, this media converter can act as two independent media converters while using a single optical fiber for data transmission to accomplish the same task, which is definitely a cost-effective solution.

Conclusion

Media converters are used both for extending transmission distance and linking LAN and WAN devices to simplify cablings. It presents an ideal choice for customers that demand an affordable solution to integrate copper and fiber infrastructure. FS helps the customer to achieve efficient simultaneous operation of LAN and WAN over the same fiber pair, which can satisfy the needs of both high-quality data transmission and distance extension to 1200-1300 feet in a cost-efficient way.