June 17, 2008 -- At NXTcomm in Las Vegas, Omnitron Systems Technology announced the launch of its FlexPoint GX/T, a standalone 1000BASE-X fiber to 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet media converter.
The FlexPoint GX/T is billed as the first unmanaged media converter that supports Gigabit jumbo frames up to 10,000 bytes. According to the company, as newer IP networks move towards using jumbo frames to reduce network overhead and to reduce CPU utilization, the FlexPoint GX/T provides superior performance and affordability for what previously was exclusive to expensive Ethernet equipment.
The company claims that the FlexPoint GX/T is also the first unmanaged Gigabit media converter that supports both 100BASE-FX and 1000BASE-X small form pluggable (SFP) transceivers, providing deployment flexibility by adding interoperability to Fast Ethernet fiber equipment.
"The new FlexPoint GX/T media converter can be deployed across a broad range of applications and is suitable for enterprise, utility, municipal, education and military applications," comments Doug Baar, Omnitron's vice president of engineering. "Depending on the SFP transceiver installed, the FlexPoint GX/T supports multimode, single mode, single mode single fiber and CWDM wavelengths, making it ideal for a wide range of Ethernet deployments."
A variety of testing and fault detection tools are provided for easy installation and troubleshooting. The GX/T supports Port Loop-Back, IEEE defined Far-End-Fault (802.3u for 100BASE-FX link) and Link Fault bit (802.3u for Auto-Negotiation) as Remote Fault indicators.
The converter generates signals when it detects a link fault, and reports detection (receiving) of these signals by displaying status on the LED. Through user DIP-switch configuration, the detection of these signals can also be propagated to the other port on the GX/T as a means of notifying connected end-devices of the link fault.
The media converter supports a commercial operational temperature range of 0 to 50 degrees C, a wide temperature range of -40 to 60 degrees C, and an extreme temperature range of -40 to 75 degrees C.