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We had fiber installed (connecting ~10 buildings) around 5 years ago and it has been working great. The initial setup involved Procurve 2848 and 2824 switches w/ 1gig transceivers. However, lately we have been considering upgrading our network both to increase bandwidth and possibly add VOIP.

However, a lot of this is assuming that we can just use pop the existing fiber into 10gig XFP transceivers in better switches and call it a day. If the fiber works fine at 1G does that mean it should be fine for 10gig? If not, how can we confirm that our existing fiber trunks will work, preferably in an affordable fashion?

edit> The fiber appears to be 62.5nm fiber, which sounds like OM1 fiber. One type states: Belden T 225182 Fiber Optic Bitrate cable 2-62.5/125 um FDDI grade (uL) Type OFNR. The other type states: OFNP ROHS Plenum 2 62.5/125 (and some distance stuff). Current transceivers are 850nm 1gig procurve transceivers.

Eric
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Presumably you're using MMF, not SMF. If you're running SMF, you'll probably be fine.

Check whether you're using 62.5µm or 50µm fibre. It's probable that your transceivers will only support the 50µm fibre. As well, you'll want to use OM3 or OM4-class fibre as OM1 or OM2 likely won't work well.

MikeyB
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Late answer for the OP but perhaps helpful to someone.

You can run 10Gbase-LRM over OM1-3 or FDDI fiber. With lower quality fibre you want to use mode conditioning patch cables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-gigabit_Ethernet#10GBASE-LRM

http://www.lanshack.com/ModeConditioning.aspx

Dan Pritts
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