Catalyst 9300 and 9500 compatible optics: what works, by model and module
The Nexus range gets the data-centre attention, but the switches that actually carry most UK enterprises are Catalyst 9300s in the wiring closet and Catalyst 9500s in the core. And the optics question on Catalyst is structurally different from Nexus: on most 9300s the switch itself has no optical ports at all. The question is […]
800G and 1.6T migration: what to check before you buy optics
800G is no longer a roadmap slide. The optics ship in volume, two form factors have settled into their ecosystems, and the IEEE standard behind the mainstream variants has been published since 2024. What has not settled is the buying process — because an 800G transceiver migration fails or succeeds on details that never mattered […]
1.6T Optical Transceivers: What Changes at 200G Per Lane
Every jump up the Ethernet speed ladder gets described the same way: twice the bandwidth in the same footprint. It is true of 1.6T, but it is also the least interesting thing about it. The change that actually matters is underneath. 1.6T is the first mainstream generation built on 200 Gigabits per second per lane, […]
