Would a gigabit fibre switch work with 100mb cards

[jasonyates]

Hi,

 

I have three 100mbps fibre PCI cards and I've found a 4 port netgear gigabit fibre switch however before I buy the cable etc I was wondering if fibre is downscaleable like traditional ethernet is. If I plug 100mbps cards into a gigabit switch, will it operate at 100mbps or will it just break.

 

Regards

[FN-GM]

it will operate at 100mbps.

[localzuk]

I'm not sure it would work properly. What switch is it?

[jasonyates]

Hi,

 

Its a Netgear GS504 4-Port Gigabit Fibre Optic Switch and I've got three D-Link 100mbps PCI cards.

 

Regards

[FN-GM]

I should have thought it would behave the same as Ethernet when you connect a 100mbs device to a gigabit switch.

[jasonyates]

Yeah thats what I thought however I don't really want to spend the money buying the gear if it wont work

[FN-GM]

Understandable

[FN-GM]

Why can't you use Ethernet?

[m25man]

No. 8O

Fiber modules are speed specific.

[jasonyates]

Thanks m25man. I thought that might be the case but wanted to check first.

 

Thanks for your help folks.

[western]

Fibre modules aren't 'speed specific', it vary from one to another. Some are 1000Mbps, others can be 1000/100/10!

[localzuk]

Fibre modules aren't 'speed specific', it vary from one to another. Some are 1000Mbps, others can be 1000/100/10!

 

Can you give an example? I have never seen such a fibre module! And google searching isn't turning up anything either.

 

Every fibre switch I've come across has been specific 100Mbit or 1000Mbit (or now 10Gbit)

[enjay]

Localzuk is right - fibre modules don't auto-negotiate in the same way as Ethernet, i.e. 10/100/1000. The converters are single speed and the speeds at each end of a fibre run must match, either 2x100 or 2x1000.

 

Not sure about the 100 card into a 1000 switch question though - having not worked with fibre switches, I'm not sure if they can auto-negotiate or not.

[kylewilliamson]

Don't forget they need to be the same type of fibre too.. (singlemode, multimode, all the other various sub categories)

[m25man]

Fibre modules aren't 'speed specific', it vary from one to another. Some are 1000Mbps, others can be 1000/100/10!

 

And my dog is green and comes from venus!

[maniac]

I'll back this up, fibre is almost always speed specific. I fell foul of this a few years ago when I brought some new HP switch gear with gigabit fibre modules in, thinking I could continue to use the 100mbs converters at the other end until the school could afford to upgrade them to gigabit. Oh how wrong was I, found out the hard way it doesn't work!

 

However a patient exists for the technology to auto negotiate, http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6504849.html so someone somewhere probably does make modules that can vary their speeds.

 

Mike.