Omnitron Systems recently introduced high-power Power over Ethernet fiber switches to both its RuggedNet (industrial) and OmniConverter (enterprise) product lines. Omnitron says the switches “enable fiber-optic distance extension to high-power PoE-powered devices.”
Sankar Ramachandran, Omnitron’s product marketing director, commented, “The introduction of the high-power PoE [HPoE] RuggedNet and OmniConverter fiber switches provide integrators and end users the ability to deploy power-hungry pan/tilt/zoom cameras with heaters and blowers, small cells, and multi-stream wireless access points at any distance from the headend network equipment. These new HPoE fiber switches provide 60 watts of high-power PoE for up to four powered devices.”
Both the RuggedNet and OmniConverter PoE fiber switches feature one or two Gigabit-speed ports, and four 10/100/1000 RJ-45 ports capable of delivering 15.4W, 30W, and 60W Power over Ethernet. They are classified as power sourcing equipment (PSE) and provide full 60W PoE power on all four RJ-45 ports.
RuggedNet industrial PoE fiber switches are standard-compliant ruggedized network switches that are temperature-hardened, from -40 to +75 degrees Celsius, and designed for deployments in manufacturing, transportation, energy, and IoT applications, Omnitron added. They feature alarm relay contact, digital input connector, and single or dual DC power.
OmniConverter PoE fiber switches are designed for standard commercial network deployments. They can be wall- or DIN-rail-mounted, and are powered using external AC or DC power adapters.
Both the RuggedNet and OmniConverter PoE fiber switches are available in managed and unmanaged models. The managed models can be managed via an IP-based web interface, Telnet, or serial console interface. The IP-based web management option provides the ability to monitor status and configure hardware parameters using a web browser.
The switches support specialized networking modes for efficient delivery of data traffic, including Directed Switch Mode and Dual Device Mode. Directed Switch Mode prevents port flooding by routing multicast traffic, such as video, only to its destination ports. Models with two fiber ports support Dual Device Mode, which enables the device to operate as two separate and isolated Power over Ethernet switches with independent fiber uplinks and RJ-45 ports.
Models with two fiber ports also facilitate daisy-chain topologies and fiber link protection with less than 50-ms failover. All models feature remote PoE port reset, which eliminates the need for dispatching technical personnel to remote locations to reset powered devices like cameras and wireless access points.
Both product lines are available with small-form pluggable (SFP) connectors, or with SC, ST, and LC fixed-fiber connectors supporting multimode, singlemode, single-fiber, and a variety of coarse wave-division multiplexing (CWDM) and dense wave-division multiplexing (DWDM) wavelengths.
