Neil, Unless you need the speed or connectivity, I would prefer messing with copper. Just too many strange incompatibilities with optical SFPs and various vendors equipment when you go optical. Things that should work, don’t, and visa versa. Wasn’t that terrible in our lab at work, because we had loads of different SFPs, cables and switches to change out to try to get things working, but at home, that sort of experimenting will most likely cost you money. At work, it mostly cost us time, and it was just part of the cost of doing business. After a while, it became a pretty routine thing for us to swap SFPs or switch ports when optical links didn’t come up when connecting new gear. When Service Providers do deployments of new equipment, they trial every component in the system before rollout for a reason. Just my two cents… Mike Willegal