MPO Trunk cable is a way to consolidate and provide compact cross-connection across the infrastructure. They are widely used in campus, telecom, data center and corporate networks. Furthermore, MPO Trunk, it cannot be said enough, cables provide exceptionally high density and high quality transmission performance and have a very low signal loss.

When thinking of MPO Trunk cables, think of 1:1 connections where both sides are 40G, 100G, 200G, 400G or even 800G. What comes in on one single end will come out on the other single end. To ensure a good connection, it is required to match Trunk Cable fiber count to that of the Transceiver or other Equipment on both ends. Below MPO Cable to Transceiver table shows the relation of transceiver Transmission lane count and required Fiber count. It is preferred to use short abbreviations to name Short Range (SR) and Long Range (LR) transceivers. After corresponding SR or LR a number is added, this matches the number of Transmission (Tx) lanes [in some cases Receiving (Rx) lanes]. For example, 100G SR4 is a 100G transceiver utilizing 4 lanes each capable of 25G data rate for Tx. The same amount of lanes are required for Rx also. To ensure 100G SR4 to 100G SR4 connection there is a need for 4 Tx lanes and 4x Rx lanes which requires a total of 8 lanes. However, MPO-8 is not used. Transceivers that require MPO-8 use MPO-12 and are developed to be fitted with it.