QSFP – Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable
The Quad stands for “4-Channel”, The (QSFP) is a compact, hot-pluggable fiber optics transceiver used in modern, high-density networks. The original form was the SFP (Small Form-factor Pluggable) which supports traffic from 1 to 10 Gbps across copper and fiber cables. SFP+ is an improvement of the SFP but with higher data rates starting from 10Gbps upwards to 32Gbps when combined with the newer Fiber Channel design. QSFP is also another improvement of the original SFP idea, it uses double fiber pairs, the additional pair allows for substantially more powerful data transmission rates. It’s variants QSFP+ supports 40Gbps on Gigabit Ethernet fiber connections whereas the QSFP28 supports up to 100Gbps.
Newer variants for the QSFP have also been introduced to support even higher data transmission rates in optical communications. The QSFP-DD (“Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable Double Density“) also known as “QSFP56-DD” can support rates between 40Gbps to 200Gbps. Of recent is the OSFP (“Octal Small Form-factor Pluggable“), is a revolutionary pluggable form factor that offers eight high-speed electrical channels at 400 Gbps (8x50G or 4x100G).
