Traceability is not a term heard often in the data equipment world. The reason why is because data companies grew out of university networks and laboratories and these environments historically placed little emphasis on mission-critical traffic. In contrast, resilient, high-availability networks are a deep part of our heritage at Advantage Optics. Back in the early 1980s, our executives were engineering and leading teams who designed high-performance switching equipment that exhibited “six nines” availability. Beyond that, Advantage Optics understands serviceability and supportability of large network designs. For decades, AO team leaders deployed high-speed optical systems in some of the largest networks worldwide. Processes for troubleshooting, isolation, hot-swapping, hot-standby and load sharing are considered when we build our customer service and support teams. We realize as Enterprise and Government networks become more complex and approach the size of global Service Providers, all components in the network need to be able to support more advanced IT serviceability standards. We are far ahead of the competition in this area. By working with our suppliers to conduct individual component testing, they provide us history of this testing throughout their supply and manufacturing processes. We then match our final product assembly and coding to every serial number and product that goes out of our U.S. facility. There have been numerous times we have been asked by our large customers to help them trace problems in their network. Although this is nearly never a transceiver issue, our customers are impressed that we can give them exact history of our devices and they appreciate the expertise we provide in analyzing any anomalies in their optical network operation.