The project aimed to establish an interconnection between fire alarm panels.  These panels were only equipped with a serial interface and were more than 1200 m apart. Therefore, they could not be connected directly using serial technologies due to the limitation of the distance serial data could travel.

In order to overcome the limitation of serial data transmission, a variety of solutions can be used to extend the data on other media such as fiber modems and media converters. Therefore, Xceltra provided integrated technology systems with a serial to fiber converter solution.

The provided solution was installed because it suited the applications and met the challenges facing the project through:

• Allows RS-232 or RS 422/485 protocols to be transmitted point-to-point over a fiber optic link
• Wide operating temperature and humidity (–40 to +60°C, 5 to 95% relative humidity)
• Useful in future expansion as it allows the use of a range verified SFP (Small Form Pluggable) transceivers which support distances up to 120km
• Supports Data rates up to 1.5 Mbit/s