Gigabit Converter Described

A gigabit converter is a transceiver device commonly used with Gigabit Ethernet and Fiber channel. By providing a standard, hot swappable electrical interface, one gigabit Ethernet port can support a wide range of physical media, from copper to long-wave single-mode optical fiber, at distances of hundreds of kilometers. It both transmits and receives something and if one side that receives a physically different network connector to the other side which transmits, then the transceiver could be doing the job of a media converter.

In the past, media converters were widely used in local area networks (LANs) when there were a number of different cabling and network standards being used, both hardware and software. At the hardware layer, there were different cable forms such as coaxial and twisted pair cables, in addition to the various connectors used. Nowadays, the older cable installations were replaced with fiber optic cabling for high-speed links. This is when the gigabit converter comes into play as there is a must to transform fiber optic to copper cabling when the fiber cable arrives at a LAN.

Most of the products in the market today convert between fiber optic cabling and some form of copper cabling, often integrated into switches, although it is still probable to buy media converters to convert between various copper cable types. Until fiber optic cabling becomes cheaper, or copper cabling has the same bandwidth and distance capacity of fiber optics, we can see a lot more of this scenario.

As opposed to fixed physical interface configurations, the allure of the GBIC standard in networking equipment is its flexibility. Where multiple different optical technologies are in use, an administrator can buy GBICs as needed, not in advance, and they can be the specific type needed for each link, whether it’s a 1000base GBIC or a 1000Base lx. This reduces the cost of the base system and gives the administrator greater flexibility. However, purchasing a switch with that port type built in will probably be cheaper and take up less space per port if it is known that a switch will mostly have one port type, specially if that port type is copper.

As gigabit converters are more probable to be used in data center environments like telecommunications installations, there are a lot of fiber optics suppliers providing media converters in a format to fit rack mounted modules. Because there are no standards for the interfaces used and it is unlikely that a media converter to suit one manufacturer’s rack will fit that of another manufacturer, make sure you know exactly what gigabit converter you need in your network before buying a 1000base GBIC or a 1000Base lx, for example.