Failure rates of optical transceivers

[kibanjain]

Hi,

We’ve been using for a long time transceivers (40G MPO) from an aftermarket vendor (fs.com) for our CISCO 3132Q-X usually they work well, but lately we have been seeing more failures than usual (suddenly a perfectly working transceiver starts having plenty of CRC errors that only go away once we replace the transceiver). Might be also related to the size of our deployment as, we have a several hundred optical transceivers (More units = more failures).

But lately we are wondering if it would make more sense to use original transceivers instead of aftermarket.

What’s your experience with aftermarket vs original optical transceivers? Reliability, MTBF, etc?

Thanks!

[Leo Laohoo]

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@kibanjain wrote:

But lately we are wondering if it would make more sense to use original transceivers instead of aftermarket.

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There are only a handful of global transceiver manufacturers. 

The good thing about buying Cisco-branded is the optics can be RMA-ed.

With 3rd party transceiver, the prices are so cheap, if anything is wrong with them it is better to throw them into the bin and buy a new one.

[balaji.bandi]

if this is from Cisco, RMA is best option and make a note.