Johannesburg, 13 Apr 2017
Most vendors view compatible optics or transceivers as competition to their brand. "They are concerned with the potential lost revenue and will often threaten their clients that the warranty will be void if third party transceivers are installed," says Wayne Nel, Prolabs Product Manager at local distributor Hardware Distribution.
As a manufacturer of transceivers, Prolabs researches, designs and produces far more optics than the vendor does. "Prolabs should be viewed as a complementary product, rather than a competitor," continues Nel, "The product really does fill the gaps in the Vendor's transceiver portfolio."
An example of this is Prolabs' extra-long haul transceivers, supporting distances over fibre of 120kms. Very few OEM's have an optic that covers this distance. There are also many Fibre channel OEM's whose limited range only supports distances of 20km over fibre. "With new regulations requiring that data centres be 25km away from each other, this poses a big problem for the vendor! However, Prolabs supply this optic, so any potential issues are eliminated," says Nel.
Prolabs is compatible with over 50 different OEMs; and offers a much wider range of transceiver options than each individual OEM can support. They also support legacy systems and obsolete OEMs. "Prolabs still manufactures X2 GBICs. They support vendors such as Marconi and 3COM. The portfolio covers brands that have long been discontinued." continues Nel.
Prolabs also supply a 10GB copper SFP; again most Vendors do not have such a product in their portfolio so this cannot be seen as a completive product. In many instances, Prolabs actually enables the vendor to complete their solution.
With the constant drive towards ever increasing data consumption amongst business and consumers, we have seen an exponential upturn in demand for fibre. Be it fibre to the home or the business.
Multiple OEM's and vendors have jumped at this opportunity offering a full fibre turn key datacentre and CPE solution to ISPs to meet this demand, but there are still gaps in their offering.
Currently OEM's have a certain number of fibre optic transceivers that connect to the fibre found in datacentres and FTTx designs, be it the standard single-mode or multi-mode fibre. Some OEMS are now offering xPon and CWDM/DWDM solutions.
But as with most OEM brands , they are only offering certain 'off the shelf' fibre products , due to the cost of manufacturing , thus only being able to offer for instance a 10G XFP over 10Km or less, or 1G SFP less than 40Km. But is this a full solution that can meet the current and future demand for fibre in South Africa?
Prolabs can completely cover any Vendors Fibre to the X solution. Prolabs covers the Network Backbone, Edge Access aggregation and Access Gateway nodes with their 10G, 40G, 100G, and WDM (CWDM and DWDM) products. They cover fibre to the Cell site with their CPRI products, and fibre to the Business/Home/Node with their 1G, 10G and a full range of XPON products.
"The vendor cannot have any issues with a reseller or service provider using compatible transceivers if they themselves don't offer the product." concludes Nel.
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