CWDM or DWDM passive add/drop muxes

Does anyone have any experience with GBIC-based CWDM and/or DWDM optical add/drop muxes (OADM)? I'm presently looking at the Cisco product lines which combines GBICs with passive multiplexors and am curious as to alternative manufacturers and the experiences other might have in these types of products in a metro application.

TIA,
Greg

I have been pretty happy with the MRV box. It is passive and it not
manageable like an ONS etc. It has been rock solid for some time.

www.mrv.com

Specifically, we are using the CWDM EM316PAMULC. The only bad thing I would
say is there is often a several week delay on delivery of ordered parts. But
when they do arrive they work well.

hth,
jim

Does anyone have any experience with GBIC-based CWDM and/or DWDM optical add/drop muxes (OADM)? I'm presently looking at the Cisco product lines which combines GBICs with passive multiplexors and am curious as to alternative manufacturers and the experiences other might have in these types of products in a metro application.

sorry, no expirience.
but the fiber-singlers from allied telesyn looks nice.

You may be interested in:

http://www.cubeoptics.com/

Passive CWDM devices available with SC or LC connector cable pigtails on them... I believe you can get models to split orr or add just a single wavelength to a 4 or 8 wavelength mux.

Greg Schwimer wrote:

Yup work fine, simple and relatively cheap.

I think the Cisco solution is just rebadged Finisar - Finisar offer a
slightly larger range including products which let you put wideband
1310nm under some CWDM grid channels - should be able to take 10GBase-LR
on the 1310nm channel.

DWDM needs temperature controlled lasers to keep them on their grid (at
<1nm vs 20nm for CWDM) which pushes the price up.

My major concern with these products is vendor compatibility between
GBICs and especially miniGBICs. Our next procurement will include some
words about the kit's GBIC slots being vendor agnostic.

As far as I know, Cisco is the only one left in the market still key:ing
their optics.

Jim Devane <jim@powerpulse.cc> uttered the following thing:

I have been pretty happy with the MRV box. It is passive and it not
manageable like an ONS etc. It has been rock solid for some time.

www.mrv.com

Specifically, we are using the CWDM EM316PAMULC. The only bad thing I would
say is there is often a several week delay on delivery of ordered parts. But
when they do arrive they work well.

I have to agree. The MRV boxes are quite nice and incredibly simple,
plus they have cheap convertors so you can use them with gear that
doesnt have GBIC/SFP based optics.

Just make sure you have a supplier who can deliver fibre patches with
'MU' type connectors - they're as rare as hens teeth and needed to plug
into the MUX.