Press Release
February 8, 2006 For Immediate Release

Ethernet Explosion causing a Mishmash of Fiber and Copper

Ottawa, IL - The growth of Ethernet connectivity on the factory floor has driven the expansion of copper and fiber cable installation. Fiber optic cable is typicallylocated in factory settings, offering long range and RFI immunity, while copper connections are found on most every piece of control equipment. The installer is often faced with connecting a piece of copper equipment to a fiber optic Ethernet drop. Or, a piece of equipment with a copper Ethernet port needs to communicate long distances or in harsh conditions where the distance and immunity properties of fiber optics are potentially the best solution.

B&B Electronics introduces our new Elinx series, EIR and EIS lines of media converters. Now you can seamlessly and accurately convert to and from fiber-to-copper through hostile RFI.EMI environments and extend the distances up to 1.2 miles (2 km) with multi mode fiber, and up to 12.4 miles (20 km) with single mode fiber.

We offer both a rugged (EIR series) industrial DIN rail mount package with extended voltage and temperature specifications and commercial (EIS) models in desk, wall, or rack mountable packages that include a power supply. These models share similar features except for voltage and temperature specifications. Each product family comes with options to convert 10/100Base TX signals to 100Base FX either with multi-mode or single mode fiber. Your choice of ST or SC connectors with multi-mode versions, or single-mode products with SC connectors.

Users have greater flexibility with enhanced features such as auto negotiation, forced modes for full or half-duplex, and 10 or 100 Mbps data rates. Link-fault-pass-through can be enabled and disabled via a dipswitch setting. The link-fault-pass-through feature allows the network manager to react to a broken link as soon as one occurs.

Other common features include: Auto MDI-X (auto-cross feature), LEDs for Power, Link/Activity, Data Rate, Duplex/Collision, Store and Forward mechanism, Broadcast storm filtering, Back-pressure and IEEE802.3x compliant flow control.

For further information on our Elinx media converters, visit B&B Electronics’ website at
www.bb-elec.com/Elinx_media.

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