Is there a best practice for which bidi direction to choose for which device type?
i.e. I assume you don't want to just wing it for every link, so do people typically choose to use all A/B on the switch side, and all B/A on the desktop/server side? If I were walking into a business, not having setup their network, what direction would I expect to need on the desktop/server side?
Aren’t BiDi transceivers usually a good bit more expensive, especially compared to how low the material cost of fiber is? What’s your use case for BiDi? I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with this stuff, though. I can easily imagine BiDi being useful to retrofit/repurpose some existing fiber, since labor costs can be a lot.
I can see it being useful for running ultra thin bend insensitive fibre around base boards; just like the FTTR thing Huawei is trying to sell.
I wish the concept was more clearly legal in Australia. I’m pretty sure once you glue the fiber in place it becomes ‘permanent’ and thus has to be done by a licensed cabler with a fiber endorsement.
I can't speak for anyone else, but we wing it for every link. When we light up a new link, we grab a matched pair, randomly select one to put in the switch, and then put the other one downstream.
i.e. I assume you don't want to just wing it for every link, so do people typically choose to use all A/B on the switch side, and all B/A on the desktop/server side? If I were walking into a business, not having setup their network, what direction would I expect to need on the desktop/server side?