I remember in the early days, we ran a fat 1/2" diameter coax
cable around the building, and you ran "taps" into it with a
special little drill. Then you ran another coax to the device you
were connecting to the ethernet. Oh man, those were the days. Good
old copper.
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
There were lots of copper interfaces before everything settled on the 8-pin modular telephone plug. 10-Base 2 could use any of the coax connectors (F, N, BNC, etc), there were 15-pin D-sub connectors, vampire taps, EAD/TAE, and probably more exotic stuff. We ended up with 8pin modular because in practice it turned out to be the most useful for the most people in the most circumstances. There's probably an old engineer who will talk your head off about the benefits of TAE compared to the 8-pin telephone plug, but we settled on the 8-pin telephone plug anyway.
The fiber stuff will settle out and become easier too. It's already happened (more or less) on the physical connectors. Anything simplex in outside plant is SC, anything on the LAN is LC. Duplex outside plant might be LC too. Anything else is just old.
BiDi is newer. It's WDM built into the interface card. You'd use duplex fibers because the circuit pre-dates BiDi, or the two fibers are already there and you have nothing to lose by using them both. The theoretical benefit of duplex is that you have the bandwidth of two fibers. At one time it might also have been cheaper interface cards, but obviously not anymore. You'd be dumb not to use BiDi today, but you might not be dumb to have spare fibers available for some future circumstance when a duplex interface will make sense.
On 10/20/2020 7:42 AM, Matt Hoppes wrote:
Right. But why would you use two fibers when BIDIs exist? Is there some benefit?
On Oct 20, 2020, at 7:37 AM, Mark Radabaugh <[email protected]> wrote:
![Recursive Standards - 927 indefinitely : xkcd]()
BIDI means you are using one fiber strand. Otherwise it’s 2 fibers, one for transmit and the other for receive.
It’s not black magic - but you do need to have some knowledge of what you are doing.
Mark--
On Oct 20, 2020, at 7:18 AM, Matt Hoppes <[email protected]> wrote:
Is there a reason there isn’t more a standard for the optics that go with fiber?
It seems any time a cut over is done there’s always the question: which optic are you using? Bi-Di or not ? Then some equipment only supports certain optics.
Twice now we’ve tried to do 1gig to 10gig wave upgrades with our providers (some large country wide names) and it’s taken multiple attempts because of optic issues.
Copper - you just plug it in and it works. Why have we not gotten to this point with fiber?
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