The industry-standard Cisco® Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP) Gigabit Interface Converter is a hot-swappable input/output device that plugs into a Gigabit Ethernet port or slot, linking the port with the network (Figure 1). SFPs can be used and interchanged on a wide variety of Cisco products and can be intermixed in combinations of 1000BASE-SX, 1000BASE-LX/LH, 1000BASE-ZX, or 1000BASE-BX10-D/U on a port-by-port basis.

1000BASE-ZX SFP for Long-Reach Single-Mode Fibers
The 1000BASE-ZX SFP operates on standard single-mode fiber-optic link spans of up to approximately 70 km in length. The SFP provides an optical link budget of 23 dB, but the precise link span length depends on multiple factors such as fiber quality, number of splices, and connectors.
When shorter distances of single-mode fiber (SMF) are used, it might be necessary to insert an inline optical attenuator in the link to avoid overloading the receiver. A 10-dB inline optical attenuator should be inserted between the fiber-optic cable plant and the receiving port on the SFP at each end of the link whenever the fiber-optic cable span loss is less than 8 dB.