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Building Ultra Long Range Toslink
his post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium: Or watch using the C3VOC/media.ccc.de player I’m a sucker for wanting to ultimately know how and why things work.
The equipment that powers these service offerings are typically built out of a collection of DWDM multiplexers (a more dense version of the previously discussed CWDM), some optical routing systems (RODAMs), and most annoyingly for us a “muxponder”. I assume that in reality the production of 1G (and slower) DWDM optics ended a long time ago, and since the retimer in this actually-10G is unlikely to cause any issues with a 1G signal, this is deemed an acceptable solution for almost all use cases (just not my insane one!) It is tempting to attach a “dialup” modem to both sides, this would probably create the greatest modern day waste of a 100 GHz optical channel, given that it gives a final output bandwidth of ~40 kbit/s, and I assume this would probably confuse an intelligence agency if they were tapping the line.
Or read this on Hacker News