Optical novelties from Ubiquiti

The Ubiquiti product lineup long ago went beyond the scope of only wireless devices for the last mile or client wi-fi - here you are now with ip phones, routers, and switches. In the lowcost segment, it is not enough to attract one thing - only the combination of functionality, ease of administration and the richness of choice together can attract a customer who prudently chooses equipment. How exactly Ubiquiti decided to expand the line of wire equipment, briefly described under the cut.

We, of course, have already written about the EdgeSwitch and UniFiSwitch family of switches - and more than once . Starting with fully-fledged 24- and 48-port switches with PoE on each port, Ubiquiti gradually added switches with L3 functionality to the equipment line with eight ports. Yes, with the power budget a little cunning: the power indicated in the model, as practice has shown, is consumed from the network with maximum load, that is, for proper planning of the PoE budget, you have to subtract 15-20 watts from the maximum to power the switch itself. At the same time, it’s hard to name another vendor who would have a full-PoE switch with L3 capabilities for half a thousand dollars in the line — and at the same time it could be controlled from the same control and monitoring system as an office Wi -Fi and telephony (this applies, of course, to devices of the UniFi Switch line). Low cost with decent, albeit slightly "marketing", performance and easy management and monitoring - these are the three pillars of Ubiquiti's success, on which the company conquered the market for cheap wireless equipment, so they are now also betting on the traditional wired segment.

Until recently, however, there was a limitation that did not allow building networks on Ubiquiti switches more difficult than an optical ring with copper “bushes” - despite the presence of ports for SFP, their number did not exceed four (two SFP + and two SFP) on the older model EdgeSwitch 48, which also carries 48 copper ports. It was impossible to aggregate the optical network on the Ubiquiti switches - in the equipment line there were, in fact, only access switches, and to build a single network on the territory of, say, a factory with cable links more than 100 meters on the equipment of one manufacturer until recently .
What has changed now? Ubiquiti introduced new switches:

• Edgeswitch 12 Fiber — eight SFP 100/1000 ports, four SFP 1G ports, four copper 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports:

• Edgeswitch 16 XG - twelve SFP + 10G, four 10GBASE-T "copper" Ethernet ports:

The performance of the switches differ by an order of magnitude: for example, the 12F bandwidth is 16 Gbit / s, and 16XG - already 160 Gbit / s (which, in fact, is logical, based on different channel port speeds), respectively, the packet performance is 23.81 and 238.10 million packets per second, respectively (wirespeed, as it should be). Based on the characteristics, the manufacturer assumes different patterns of use of these switches. So, ES-16-XG is positioned as an aggregating switch:

Capacity allows its use on large by the standards of typical Ubiquiti clients' networks, while ES-12F is more likely to connect remote buildings or households using simple and cheap end routers with an SFP port:

The possibilities remained virtually unchanged compared to the “classic” copper EdgeSwitch: from L3 on both new switches, routing along static routes (or policy-based, only 16 routes for 15 different interfaces) is supported, and a DHCP server is also provided (128 pools with a maximum limit of 2048 addresses for 16-XG and 8 pools with a maximum limit of 128 addresses for 12F) - however, the characteristics of this server most likely assume its operation either only in the network control subnet of the network equipment, or as a test at all ostroyki network.

A logical continuation of the announcement of the line of switches with optical ports was the announcement of the appearance of Ubiquiti equipment in the assortment and its own (in any case, just like switches, branded — what is inside, we cannot say yet) of SFP- and SFP + modules, as well as optical cable under its own brand. Now it is not necessary (or at least not necessary) to search for a list of compatible SFPs with the required switch somewhere in the depths of the forum: 1G and 10G modules are available in one- and multimode versions (SM and MM, respectively):

Modules are sold in pairs, work distances range from a maximum of 300 meters for UF-MM-10G to 10 kilometers for UF-SM-10G and UF-SM-10G-S. With modules for both single and multimode fibers, the Ubiquiti native cable will only be single mode. According to the manufacturer, multimode SFPs have been added to improve compatibility with the cable infrastructure that may already be available at the sites. The finished cables will be available in lengths of 100, 200 and 300 feet (30.48, 60.96 and 91.44 meters respectively).

Well, and finally - the question of cost. On this front, replaying Ubiquiti is very hard.

The EdgeSwitch 12 Fiber switch will cost $ 229 , while the Edgeswitch 16 XG costs $ 636 . Affiliate prices on the site .

As for the prices for SFP-modules, the situation here is as follows:

Prices for the remaining modules here .

Well, ready-made optical patch cords will cost, depending on the length, from 71 to 143 dollars.

It’s interesting that Ubiquiti has the cheapest BRAS lineup?