Clarifications about Cisco Fiber Optic (FO) transceivers --- Bust Some Myths
ICI sells many (5000+) FO transceivers every year, most of which are Cisco original. Every week we got common questions about FO transceivers’ quality and price. We will not pretend that we know deep down the factory-floor, but we believe that a summary of our experience and observation may be useful to most of our friends,
1. Cisco original FO transceivers means that the FO transceivers are ordered from Cisco official commercial tool (CCW), and manufactured in Cisco authorized factory like Finisar, Fiberxon, etc. These factories are real Tier-1 factories of global FO transceiver industry. From these factories there are no leakage that could possibly go out to open-market (if they do, they lose tens of million dollars). Cisco global manufacturing system is unified, controlled centrally by Cisco Global Operations Team. So there is nothing like Cisco China, Cisco US, Cisco Malaysia. There is only 1 global Cisco in terms of manufacturing. Each country’s only difference are pricing (discount) and service definition (abiding local laws). The quality and manufacturing processes are all the same globally.
2. Some friends face huge challenge in budget, so ICI also sells compatible FO transceivers under ICI name, always attached with 3-year warranty. This means we are confident in our quality, and we never cheat anyone this was manufactured by Cisco or related to Cisco. No, they are not, and only ICI is responsible to these FO transceivers’ quality. We choose the best FO transceiver factory that we can find, and we make sure that they are compatible with Cisco. We are not saying these compatible FO transceivers are perfect, or “100% as good as Cisco original”. Even though we are so careful, In real life, we confronted 3 challenges so far with these compatible FO transceivers,
a) They may not run 100% traffic of the designed tech specs. For example, sometimes the 10GE FO transceivers cannot run full 10Gbps rate. This is a big waste of your expensive core IP network equipment and the IP traffic expenses from your upstream ISP. Even for Hong Kong, where the local IP traffic price is the lowest all around Asia, that 1Mbps may cost only US$3 but still if you waste 200Mbps (out of 10 Gbps = 10,000mbps, only 2%, seemed not big), being US$600 per month, with which you can replace it with Cisco original FO transceivers.
b) The compatible FO transceivers may have firmware issue with high-end products like Cisco Nexus 7000 or 9000 series switches. For example, compatible SFP-10G-ER or ZR might not be recognized by Nexus 7000’S F2 line card, even if you issue the hidden command to disregard the brand of FO transceivers. This may severely add uncertainty to your project management, especially in timing.
c) Some compatible factories provide non-standard 120 Km Ethernet FO transceivers, but according to field use, some of them can only last 1+ years. This may bring certain risk to your backbone network availability, because obviously a 120 Km span cannot be an unimportant route.
3. “OEM” means fake, very simple. We do not sell OEM, and we strongly object that any friend consider OEM, no matter you are the end user or reseller, because,
a) OEM factories only cares about the package, rather than quality. Therefore, many OEM FO transceivers are actually made in used raw materials, including the chips and optical components. Used materials cause many absurd results that we’ve see in last 10 years.
b) If you are a reseller, selling OEM Cisco FO transceivers would easily destroy your credibility, and for mid-long term, it’s very unworthy. Couple thousand dollar extra margin is definitely trivial compared with a multi-year trust between 2 good companies.
c) OEM transceivers do not have parallel packaging to Cisco original. In many cases, the printing looked similar, but the quality is quite different, that a bottom-line sense of observation would tell the difference. When you feel it’s fishy, it’s fishy.
4. Good strategy to choose the FO transceiver for your own or your customer’s network
a) If the budget is enough, always firstly check Cisco original FO transceivers. For Cisco original FO transceivers, Cisco local office and official AM is the only trustworthy source.
b) If the FO transceiver is for your core / backbone network, always firstly check Cisco original FO transceivers, and try not to consider compatible. Never consider OEM for such links.
c) If the FO transceiver is for non-critical applications, the line utilization rate is less than 70%, and the budget is under big pressure, it’s reasonable that you can consider compatible alternatives.
d) The normal discount of Cisco original FO transceivers are 65%~80% off Cisco global list prices. You can easily find Cisco global list prices on Google.
e) Ebay is a relatively safe place because of the strict quality guideline, but still there are many OEM pretending Cisco original on it. BE VERY CAREFUL!
f) Sometimes you can find very cheap Cisco original on Ebay, but the manufacture date may be early (before 2008), that the rest longevity is obscure. If you can find the Serial Number on it, always check with your Cisco AM or ICI. If you are not familiar with your Cisco AM, talk with us and we can help you check.
5. We can help you check the Serial Numbers of any FO transceivers, in order to see whether it’s existing in Cisco database or not.
a) If we cannot find the Serial Number in Cisco database, this means 100% this FO transceiver is fake / OEM / imitated (cheaply) / fraudulent.
b) If we can find the Serial Number in Cisco database, this means it may or may not be a Cisco original. Because many OEM copies original serial numbers too.
6. A special note about SFP-GE-T: most Cisco FO transceiver product numbers have compatible counterparts, e.g GLC-LH-SMD, SFP-10G-LR, etc. However, SFP-GE-T does NOT have compatible counterpart. This means if you need to use SFP-GE-T on your ASR 1000 or ASR 9000 routers,, you HAVE TO use Cisco original, and you CANNOT use compatible from the open market. Many people, even many Cisco resellers usually mistake the 2 similar models – SFP-GE-T and GLC-T. GLC-T are for most Cisco switches, and SFP-GE-T are for most Cisco mid-high end routers. More detailed information are available in below latest Cisco official document:
7. Some new friends asked us, how do you justify yourself that you are pro-Cisco-Original, why not you sell high-quality OEM as Cisco Original and make the big chunk of margin? The answer is simple, we are an engineering company, not a sales-oriented company or a broker. Most of our regular customers are Tier-1 ISP and telecom companies, and we spent 3+ years with each one to build up our business. These guys are tough. They know it, we know it; they know we know it, and we know they know it. If we screw, we are out, very simple rule.
Usually for our new customers of Cisco original FO transceivers, upon request we give 1 unit of OEM sample (of the same model) for free of charge. This way if there is any concern or challenge in future, it’ll be very easy to compare in hand and tell the truth, internally or externally. Of course, we can provide Cisco database information for any Cisco original FO transceivers sold by us as well.
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This article was not made for show-off. We understand the difficulty of making wise decisions, and we believe the only right way is to make better transparency of information for everyone. Any question or discussion is welcomed.
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