Making mixed-vendor breakout cables work in the field
When a long-standing Altnet customer ran into repeated failures in roadside cabinets, the solution wasn’t the fibre - it was compatibility.
Sector: Broadband provider
Location: UK
Network type: Access network (roadside cabinets)
Speed: 40g QSFP+ to 10G SFP+ breakout
Solution: Dual-coded AOC / mixed vendor breakout configuration
The Challenge
The provider needed to breakout 40G Adtran to 4x 10G Juniper ports.
Repeated failures in roadside cabinets - often in remote locations - were leading to costly engineer callouts and delays across the country, from Bedfordshire to the Highlands.
An AOC solution provided a sealed optic and cable in one piece, lowering the possibility of dust or pollution contamination. But standard AOCs are coded for a single vendor. In this case, breakout cables were only available with either Juniper or Adtran coding - not both.
Our Approach
Drawing on an established relationship, the customer approached us with what had become a persistent 'head scratcher'. We supplied a bespoke, dual-coded breakout AOC, programmed differently at each end to operate seamlessly across the mixed-vendor environment. This is an approach we regularly deploy in copper DAC environments, adapted here to solve a more complex optical challenge.
Where standard vendor coding forced a single-vendor choice, Fibrenet were able to engineer compatibility across both.
The Impact
- Delivered a working solution in 1 week vs 3-month vendor lead time
- More than 90% cost reduction compared to the vendor cable
- Eliminated repeated engineer callout costs to remote locations
- Completely bespoke compatibility capability beyond standard coding limits