transceiver is a combination of two words transmitter and receiver and these are usually combined within the same piece of equipment or the same component a transceiver allows for modularity you may have a switch like this one you can see there are a number of open interfaces in the switch you slide in the transceiver that's appropriate for the media or the network type that you would like to use and now that particular interface will operate with that particular configuration so if you need a copper configuration for gigabit Ethernet you slide in a copper gigabit Ethernet transceiver or if you need a fiber based 10 gig connection you slide in a 10 gig fiber transceiver this means that you could have every interface on the switch have a different type of media depending on what transceiver you are planning to use there are different types of transceivers different form factors and different transceivers depending on the media for example if you are using an ethernet switch you need an Ethernet transceiver if you're using a fiber channel switch then you will need a fiber channel transceiver you can't use fiber channel transceivers in an ethernet switch or vice versa this means you get to decide what media type works best for your configuration if you need copper connections you can use a copper transceiver and if you need fiber connections you can use a fiber transceiver and if you need to change those connections Midway through your installation you can remove the copper transceiver and replace it with a fiber transceiver this type of modularity often comes at an additional cost but it does provide you with a way to plug into whatever network type you might need one common transceiver type is the SFP type that stands for small form factor pluggable for example you can plug in a fiber SFP and connect your fiber connections to that particular transceiver but if you needed copper you could easily slide in a copper SFP and plug in your RJ45 connector sfps are commonly associated with gigabit Ethernet so that's 1 gbit per second there is an enhanced version of SFP called enhanced small form factor pluggable or SFP plus they look identical in size to an SFP but they support much higher speeds up to 16 gbits per second so if you have a 10 gig connection then you're probably using SFP plus when you're installing equipment into a rack that's in a data center you have a limited amount of space available first the equipment is only 19 in wide and the total amount of space available in the rack is limited by the amount of space you have in the data center so we want to be sure that we can put as much connectivity into a single space as possible to that end we've created the qsfp or the quad small form factor pluggable this effectively allows you to have four times the amount of throughput into a space that's very similar to that of an SFP for example an SFP in this form would be a quad small form factor pluggable or qsfp which consists of four channels of SFP so if one SFP is a 1 gabit per second connection a quad SFP would be compatible with a 4 gabit throughput the same thing applies for the SFP plus there is a quad SFP plus that is a 4 channel SFP plus since it's common to see a 10 gigabit connection on a single SFP plus a quad SFP plus can support four of those for a total throughput of 40 gbits per second this is where we start to see a benefit not only in the amount of space that we're using inside of these devices but we can take a single fiber connection and effectively extend four separate links over that single fiber there's cost benefit there for equipment and for the media itself although the names are very similar the form factor are slightly different between an SFP and SFP plus and a quad SFP or quad SFP Plus on the left is an SFP or SFP plus both the SFP and SFP plus use the same form factor although the transceivers are obviously very different the quad SFP or quad SFP plus also share the same form factor but you can see it's slightly larger than the traditional SFP or SFP plus although it is slightly larger larger than an SFP it's not four times the size of an SFP so we are getting an efficiency in Space by using a quad SFP or quad SFP Plus