knowledge bank

Thinking about rolling up your sleeves and designing a CWDM or DWDM network? You probably understand the basics of wavelength division multiplexing and its great potential to provide capacity expansion and flexibility at a cost you can afford. Now you n...

As we have seen, embedded xWDM (CWDM or DWDM) networking offers a simple, easy to manage and cost-efficient solution for transporting large amounts of data over short to mid-range distances. Today (2020), standard transceivers are available for up to 40...

Amplification boosts the signal in the optical fiber so that it can overcome the attenuation, i.e. it increases the distance over which the data between two sites can be transmitted. One of the major criteria for an embedded network to work is that the...

Many people looking to build an embedded WDM network will use the distance specification of the transceiver and the distance of the fiber as the key criteria for designing the network. This is a risky way to go. Under ideal circumstances, a DWDM ZR tran...

The simplest way to create a Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) network is using an embedded WDM solution. In an embedded solution, a CWDM or DWDM transceiver is connected directly into a SAN or IP switch. Each signal that comes from the different t...

A WDM multiplexer, sometimes referred to as a mux, is the key to optimizing, or maximizing, the use of the fiber. The multiplexer lies at the heart of the operation, gathering all the data streams together to be transported simultaneously over a single...

In the first article of our series on WDM, Getting on the road with dark fiber, we compared a fiber optic network to a powerful multi-lane expressway, capable of transporting traffic between various sites. And just as we have traffic rules for driving,...

We’ve looked at an analogy for fiber networks that compares them to a road network. Fiber itself, however, is tiny – about the same diameter as a strand of human hair – and the traffic it carries is in the form of light. To the human eye, light appears...

The foundation for Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is the possibility to send all sorts of data over fiber networks in the form of light. WDM makes it simple to maximize the capacity and performance of a fiber network, but it can be challenging t...