I have a project that is setting up a new site. After having the on site contact confirm connection directly to the carrier equipment we have discovered that the conduit that was supposed to extend connection from the suite to the MPOE where the carrier equipment was >100m (~350ft) so the the length of the run is likely the culprit. How nobody realized this might be a problem ahead of time I'm surprised.
We could obviously run fiber through the conduit to the suite, but the network edge device only has RJ45 ports so that would require a media converter. I have a vendor suggest an ethernet extender (e.g. Blackbox) to use the existing copper run to allow one to run beyond 100m length spec, but I can't say I have much experience to suggest how their reliability compared to a media converter would compare. My past experience with media converters has been hit and miss. I have seen cases in the past with sites like this where a site is seeing odd packet loss where there is no saturation of the circuit and the carrier isn't reporting issues and the media converter was causing issues. Sometimes you have someone on-site that powercycles the media converter and the problem goes away for awhile, but I have seen some cases where they just outright fail. Maybe the media converters that I have seen used were just too low end to be reliable, but since this is for a WAN circuit I'm obviously concerned about reliability. Ideally I would just have an edge device that supported fiber and just eliminate any potential additional point of failure, but I'm not sure that is going to be an option budget wise.
So I'm curious whether anybody has any good recommendations for media converters or whether anybody has any success with ethernet extenders that they would actually recommend?
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