Moxa's OBU-102 Series fiber optic bypass unit enables the bypass function to be used in any network node. In linear topologies, any power outage or node failure will cause communication between all network nodes down the line to be interrupted, so a large part of the network may be disabled in such an outage. With the bypass feature, in the event of a failure, the faulty node is bypassed and thus the rest of the network is not affected. The OBU-102 Series sits between the node and the network to add bypass functionality to any network switch that does not support this functionality. In normal cases, the OBU-102 Series takes over the task of routing network traffic from the network switch. However, when an outage occurs, the OBU-102 Series bypasses the dead switch and redirects network traffic to another switch.