Practical Distance between Catalyst 2950C-24's over 62.5 MM Fiber

[admin_2]

I have a customer that has asked me to connect 2 of their buildings together. The 2 buildings are accross the street from each other but the fiber distance between the 2 may be as long as 2500ft. I am considering using 2 Catalyst 2950C-24's, one on each end of the connection. I have had some difficulty finding a distance limitation for the 2950C's over 62.5 micron MM fiber. This configuration would allow a 100baseFX connection for now but the customer may wish in the future to increase the bandwidth to 1GB. I would like to know how long a fiber pull between these two devices could be without problems. If anyone could offer any suggestions I would appreciate it.

[tbaranski]

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps628/products_installation_guide_chapter09186a00801cd6e8.html#1065078 says the limit is 2KM, which is per the 100Base-FX standard.

[#3]

Thanks for the help. I actually skimmed through that document before posting. But I obviously missed that part.

I should get the idiot award for this one!

[konigl]

Make sure your customer knows that going to Gigabit may not be an option over MMF if the distance is too great. Standards specify support for 62.5/125 fiber out to 220m to 275m with SX optics, and out to 550m with LX optics and mode-conditioning patch cords. (LX has been pushed as far as 700m reliably, but exceeds the standards).

Their best option for faster-than-100-meg service is to use Fast EtherChannel: n x 100-meg links, if they have multiple strand-pairs available.