10GBASE-LRM Interoperability Testing

The industry came together in the first 3rd party testing held at the Cisco Photonics Labs in Monza, Italy, September 18-22, 2006 to evaluate various optical transceiver form factors (X2, XFP, and SFP+) over 220 meters of OM1 (62.5 μm) multimode fiber, and 260 meters of OM2 (50 μm) multimode fiber.  Ethernet Alliance members Excelight/Sumitomo, Fiberxon, Finisar, Fujitsu, Intel, Opnext, and Picolight successfully conducted multivendor interoperability testing of 10GBASE-LRM optical interfaces in support of the IEEE Std. 802.3aq™-2006.

The 802.3aq serial optical interface standard (also known as 10GBASE-LRM) was developed by the IEEE for the purpose of offering a cost-effective and small form factor compatible 10 Gigabit Ethernet optical link for extended reach applications on legacy multimode fiber. The 10GBASE-LRM standard was approved for publication during the week of September 17 and is expected to be published in October 2006. 10GBASE-LRM uses electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) techniques to support transmission of 220 meters on installed multimode fiber plant in enterprise networks. This enables the easy upgrade to 10 Gigabit Ethernet of existing fiber connections between datacenter switches and workgroup switches.