[IP] EFF: Secret Surveillance Evidence Unsealed in AT&T Spying Cas

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 06:03:18AM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:

> Well, the need for optical amplifiers is not so much a power availability 
> issue so much as a complexity issue. If one has dozens or hundreds of 
> fibers, remember that each of these is going to be some random wavelength 

Since you're about the only authority on WAN networking I know, and I've
been slowly starting using low-end (GBIC based monomode and multimode
WAN) recently, I have the following questions for you:

a stupid way to wire up the neighbourhood with fiber is connect
every household with medium converter or a GBIC to a large switch,
and once you're running out of ports to build a tree of those.
However, I've only come across some 8-16 porters which take optical
input and are cheap. Do you use vanilla large switches, and use media 
converters for each, something like a large patch panel, with
glass coming in, and copper going out? Is there a special device 
class for residential fiber Ethernet, and if yes, how much do these 
things cost? 

If you don't want to use routers, one has to use trees of switches.
Newer switches can manage redudant links/loops with spanning-tree,
and similiar. Is there a way to mesh up a tree of switches not
using a real router? (Even though a low-end box like a X2100 M2 
can probably saturate all onboard GBit ports, and then some 4 more), 
at wire-speed.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE