While researching this for a radio telescope, I found amazingly
inexpensive (<$10) fiber optic transceivers for 1Gbps sorts of rates..
They take a standard singlemode duplex fiber and have a pinout suitable
for plugging into a Cisco, etc. switch. Apparently, there's some
internal programming which sets the hardware for the kind of switch,
rates, etc.. fs.com has a generic ASIC inside the adapter which can be
reprogrammed for whatever formatting, compatibility etc is needed. The
astronomers were saying that at Berkeley, they bought a box for a few k
which allows them to reconfigure the transceivers.
Something like this:
https://www.fs.com/products/12622.html
Data sheet here: https://img-en.fs.com/file/datasheet/sfp1g-lx-31-10km.pdf
and a 10 meter patch cable is $5
https://www.fs.com/products/40203.html
This is sort of "old news" in the networking world (the SFP form factor
was defined in 2001)
It seems like you could probably figure out how to interface to these
things and use them to distribute timing signals.
I'll be talking to the radio astronomers tomorrow again, and I'll see
what I can find out about interfaces. I suspect they do NOT use them for
conventional networking - they're all about running lots of bits from
antennas into large multichannel correlators/beamformers.
They're buying these things by the dozen.
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