Failure rates of optical transceivers

[mewspung62]

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]

Our optics are from SmartOptics and we have not ran into any issues.
Have you tried contacting FS.com and getting the faulty optics RMA-ed? 

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@mewspung62 wrote:

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

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With Cisco-branded transceivers, they can be RMAed.

[balaji.bandi]

yes, this is what noticed with cisco SFP, even now a day new SFP 10GB-SR-S has more failures noticed, compared to 3rd party, unfortunately, cisco officially does not support when you raise a tac case, but I see some stable use cases with higher side capacity compare to Cisco in the market also experienced.

But any time cisco can replace ( i been hearing life time warranty for the SFP). most the time my experience, they replaced the faulty one without asking for any further information.

[Leo Laohoo]

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@balaji.bandi wrote:

most the time my experience, they replaced the faulty one without asking for any further information.

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Depends on which TAC region your case falls into.  

Right now, there is a a TAC region that has a KPI which measures how long a case spends in Customer Waiting state -- The longer the case stays in "Customer Waiting" the better.

How a TAC agents gets achieves that KPI is astounding:  It makes me think that I was dealing with some two-bit service desk and not a professional one like Cisco TAC.