Accelerate Your Business with Cisco Optics

Connectivity is ever-changing, and a growing dependence on the internet impacts how people and businesses interact. With expectations for seamless, high-quality, and secure connections rising, businesses are leaping into the digital world. This requires network connections to support increasingly demanding experiences for remote and mobile work, education, health, cloud-connected applications, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, real- time video streaming, and more.

Pluggable optics, which convert between high-speed electrical and optical signals, enable high-data-rate transmission between servers, switches, and routers connected with fiber optics cables. These pluggable optics allow you to increase your network’s capacity with maximum flexibility. You can select optical module data rates and fiber lengths to fit your network architecture needs, and plug in the optical modules you need as network requirements grow.

It’s becoming increasingly complex to adopt higher network data rates. In the past, it was simple to match optics to distance and data rates, and pluggable optics tended to be an accessory to network architecture. However, as data rates have increased and more choices between pluggable optics have become available, selecting the right optical modules can have significant implications on your fiber cable infrastructure, your ability to upgrade network hardware, and the overall reliability—uptime—of mission- critical network connections.

Every day, optics are becoming more sophisticated, complex, and integral to your network architecture. Frequently, they’re the starting point for network architecture—and are quickly becoming massive capital investments. Thanks to advances in silicon (ASICs), the cost per bit for router/switch ports have steadily decreased. However, the cost per bit for pluggable optics has not come down as fast as router/switch ports. As a result, they represent a larger fraction of total hardware costs.

Cisco Optics deliver reliability for mission-critical connections across servers, switches, and routers—meeting your connectivity requirements today and in the future. And when your technology is working for you, your organization can spend more time on high-value tasks to deliver the connected experiences that your customers expect.

Cisco offers the world’s best supply chain. Always looking further downstream, we offer a single point of access to a secure, multisource optics supply chain, and take care of logistics to ensure optics product availability for your network—whenever and wherever you need it.

As a network equipment manufacturer, we understand how optics work in your architecture—connecting servers, switches, and routers across campus, data center, and transport networks. We have the optical module portfolio to meet every need and use case, from fiber reuse to new deployments, and from connections within the data center to the networks between them.

From product assistance to module replacements throughout the optics lifecycle, Cisco’s global service and fulfillment sites provide same-day replacements, and 24/7 support teams to help minimize network downtime.

Wherever you plug in, even across ports from different vendors, we ensure standards compliance, cross-platform compatibility, and optical module interoperability. Cisco tests and verifies optical, electrical, and mechanical design for every optical module. As a result, our pluggable optical transceivers offer reliability you can count on—performing better than industry benchmarks—with fewer than 100 parts per million field return rates.

A leader in sustainability, we set industry standards by using circular economy principles in design and sustainability principles in sourcing. Our public goals for 2025 illustrate exactly where we’re setting our sights as a sustainable technology vendor.

Cisco is at the forefront of optics industry innovation, helping drive several optics industry Multi-source Agreement (MSA) groups, including 100G Lambda MSA, and the Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable Double Density (QSFP-DD) MSA.