Future Development Trend Of Media Converter

With the progress of network technology, the local development of Ethernet has been unable to adapt to its development. Therefore, media converters have emerged as equipment for long-distance optical signal transmission. As a result, there are now many foreign and domestic manufacturers of media converters, and their product lines are extremely rich. The types of media converters are also very complex. The development of optical fiber networks has become an inevitable trend, so today's enterprises directly use optical fiber as a transmission medium to establish backbone networks when building their own networks. Many enterprises have also upgraded their existing networks based on commercial needs.

Media converter is an Ethernet transmission media conversion unit that interchanges short distance twisted pair electrical signals with long distance optical signals. It is also known as a photoelectric converter in many places. Basic characteristics of media converters: Completely transparent to network protocols. Provide ultra low latency data transmission. Supports an ultra wide operating temperature range. Using a dedicated ASIC chip to achieve data line speed forwarding. Programmable ASICs combine multiple functions on a single chip, with advantages such as simple design, high reliability, and low power consumption, enabling devices to achieve higher performance and lower costs. The network management equipment can provide functions such as network diagnosis, upgrade, status reporting, exception reporting, and control, and can provide complete operation logs and alarm logs.

With the attention paid to network construction by the country in recent years, the demand for network equipment in the market has increased significantly. The products of the domestic media converter industry are still being improved, and users have also put forward many new requirements for equipment. Media converter manufacturers still need to improve in multiple aspects.

First, the media converter itself should be better able to adapt to the actual network environment. In practical projects,
media converters are mostly used in corridors or outdoors, and the power supply situation is very complex. This requires that the equipment of each media converter manufacturer should preferably be able to support an ultra-wide power supply voltage to adapt to unstable power supply conditions. At the same time, due to the occurrence of ultra-high and ultra-low temperature weather conditions in many regions of the country, the impact of lightning strikes and electromagnetic interference is also real. All of these have a significant impact on outdoor equipment such as transceivers, which requires equipment suppliers to be meticulous and strict in the adoption of key components, circuit layout and welding, as well as structural design.

Secondly, today's media converter products are not smart enough. For example, when the optical path of a media converter is disconnected, the electrical port on the other end of most products will still remain open, so upper layer devices such as routers, Ethernet switches, and so on will continue to contract to this electrical port, resulting in data unavailability. It is hoped that the media converter manufacturer can achieve automatic switching on the optical fiber transceiver. When the optical port is disconnected, the electrical port will automatically alarm upward, and prevent the upper layer equipment from continuing to send data to the port. Redundant links are enabled to ensure uninterrupted service.

Thirdly, in terms of network management control, most users hope that all network devices can be remotely managed through a unified network management platform, that is, the MIB library of media converters can be imported into the entire network management information database. Therefore, media converter manufacturers need to ensure standardization and compatibility of network management information during product development.

In short, although media converters can beat Ethernet in the transmission distance of 100 meters in data transmission, when it comes to truly achieving non blocking transmission in real life, the security and stability of data will be affected. Therefore, in the future, media converters will continue to develop in the direction of high intelligence, high stability, high reliability, high management, and low cost, which is also the development needs of society and the times.