Media converters stretch Gigabit’s range

There’s always room for improvement. Although much of the development around Gigabit Ethernet of late has centered around making the components denser and cheaper, Transition Networks this week pushed the technology to new distances.

Transition unveiled Gigabit Ethernet media converters that the company says can transmit signals up to 125 kilometers over single-mode fiber optics. Previous technologies transmitted Gigabit Ethernet in the 70-km range.

Transition says the converters have already been successfully deployed at a European customer.

Media converters from a company like Transition take signals traveling on one medium, such as copper wiring, and transfer them to another medium, such as fiber-optic lines.

The new converters include a copper-to-fiber converter and a multi-mode to single-mode fiber converter.

The converters have several significant features. They are able to auto-negotiate the best rate between them. They are also able to detect the transmitting and receiving sides of a circuit and adapt, so that a misconfiguration doesn’t have to be corrected; Transition says this is important because there is no diagnostic device that can find such errors. Plus, the converters are able to detect disrupted links and report them as such to network managers.

The products are shipping today, and are available in stand-alone configurations or as part of a chassis system.