Case Histories

Fiber-based LANs are used in a wide range of applications. The case histories profiled below discuss how optical fiber was used in specific applications and touch on why network designers selected a fiber-based solution.

Featured Applications

• Cabling Cowboys Stadium: A five-star facility, Texas Style.
• Casino environments demand high performance systems.
• Dallas Cowboy's Technology Head discusses new stadium's infrastructure.
• Blown fiber aids hospital with network changes
• Air-blown fiber system aids National Library of Medicine.

Table of Contents

1. Corporate Offices
• New York Information Technology Center, New York
• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Dallas, TX
2. Education (University)
• Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland
• Fairfield University, Fairfield, Conn.
• Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJ
• Emory University?s Rollins School of Public Health, Atlanta
3. Education (K-12)
• Guilford County School System, Greensboro, N.C.
• Richardson Independent School District, Richardson, TX
• Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, Nashville, TN
• Fowlerville Junior High School, Fowlerville, Michigan
• Mother Teresa Catholic Secondary School, Ontario
• New York Public School 199, New York, New York
4. Museum & Laboratory
• J. Paul Getty Center, Brentwood, Calif.
5. Industrial
• Susquehanna Pfaltzgraff, Co., York, Penn.
6. Government/Military
• The U.S. Special Operations Command, MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Fla.
• The Materials and Manufacturing Directorate of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
7. Laboratory
• University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.
8. Hotel/Conference Center
• Bally's Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada

1. Fiber LAN Profiles: Corporate Offices

New York Information Technology Center, New York

New or Rebuild? New

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

• Need to provide tenants state-of-the-art equipment and access to high-speed transmission services. Technology is a selling point for occupancy.
• Wanted to jump off the "recabling treadmill" Because fiber is protocol independent and accommodates high transmission rates over long distances, the communications infrastructure will handle all current or envisioned applications.

Installation Details:

Called Manhattan's "Hottest wired office building": Built to offer each of its tenants access to a host of telecommunications options. As part of the leasing package, tenants are provided with hook-ups for high speed voice, video and data transmission; an intrabuilding local area network linking all tenants; local and long-distance service; satellite communications; and high-speed Internet access. The novel feature of the high-rise is that the fiber belongs to the building, so tenants can just "plug in".

High-speed fiber infrastructure provides redundant points of entry to the building. Currently delivers 100 Mbps to each tenant with capacity for more.

Targeted tenants are "new media" businesses that need access to state-of-the-art equipment and access to high-speed transmission services. 55 Broad street offers both affordable space and superior telecommunications access.

Quotes

"Fiber is the one medium that really matches a building's life cycle. We don't see fiber obsolescent in any environment. So the design at 55 Broad is life cycle: We only have to do the construction once. There are many benefits to the fiber infrastructure. For instance, with the deployment of fiber we can put in multiplexers that handle voice, video and data at very high speeds. With copper, on the other hand, there are limits. Besides, these are media-dependent tenants, and fiber is an ideal medium for them." Jerry Marmelstein, President, Rise Management Systems

"As a result of what's happened at 55 Broad, many property owners are now re-evaluating telecommunications issues and other infrastructure issues to update their buildings. All these companies are trying to build an infrastructure that ties into the new media, and fiber is always applicable." Jerry Marmelstein

"In real estate, the axiom used to be location, location, location. Now it's, location, bandwidth, location." Gilbert.

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Dallas, TX

New or Rebuild? New

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

• Used fiber because network reliability is critical: The bank processes 3 to 4 million checks and transfers daily via computer links with other financial institutions. Has a network uptime requirement of 99.85%
• Budget was an important consideration. They initially rejected fiber cabling as too costly in favor of a composite cabling scheme using UTP or STP. However, the difficulties they confronted when planning the installation along with recent reductions in the cost of fiber optic components, convinced them to reconsider their decision.

Installation Details:

• The bank was relocating 1,000 users and their desktop workstations to a new building in downtown Dallas.
• Installation uses a composite cabling strategy with both fiber and UTP at each desktop information outlet. A pair of FDDI-compliant fiber optic cables link the 1,000-user Token Ring LAN, while four UTP pair connect voice, dumb terminals and low-speed data communications devices such as modems and FAX machines.
• Two backbone fiber rings provide redundancy. 8 user rings support up to 60 devices per ring. Each user ring is bridged to each backbone ring to ensure that if a bridge or backbone fails, an alternate path is available.
• Transmission range was a key consideration. The first floor alone covers six acres. Fiber cable can run up to 2 km before it needs regeneration. If they had chosen a copper-based solution, they would have needed to add auxiliary wiring closets on the first floor in addition to conventional wiring closets on each floor. This would have forced them to hire "at least twice as many technical staff just to cover the building."

Quotes:

"We compared installing STP, with the concentrators in wiring closets starred onto a high-speed backbone, to fiber to the desktop running back to a central location. At worst case, we found that by 'homerunning' all or our concentrators into one location, the cost associated with each scenario was a break-even proposition."

"At the time we were evaluating cabling strategies, we were in the process of migrating from 4 to 16 Mbps Token Ring. At this point we started thinking about the future. The question was, "how far into the future was STP going to take us?" The next obvious step was FDDI. We believed STP at 16 Mbps would carry us between six and eight years at best. We expect that the fiber-optic infrastructure installed today will provide us with at least a 15 year life span. This is nearly double the life span we projected for STP."

In the final analysis, we asked ourselves, "Why go with something you know will run out of bandwidth, when you can start out with a medium that will solve current requirements as well as future growth? We now have the physical infrastructure that allows us to look at FDDI, ATM and future high-speed networking technologies without having to worry about ripping out cable and starting over."

2. Fiber LAN Profiles: Education (University)

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland

New or Rebuild? Six year update

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

Wanted to future proof their network (installed both multimode and single-mode fibers not only in the backbone but also in the riser and horizontal)

Installation Details:

Central to their plan was a standardized FTTD architecture -- extremely rare when the network was planned in 1988.

• Connects 92 buildings on 130 acre campus using seven hubs and more than 7,000 miles of cable. Backbone is loose tube cable containing 24 singlemode fiber snd 24 multimode fibers. Each of the seven hubs serves 6 to 13 buildings with cable containing 16 multimode and 6 singlemode fibers.
• Hubs are connected to two super hubs in the network's center. The result is a dual star topology -- a hierarchical design that allows reconfiguration of the logical network to support ring and point-to-point topologies by changing the equipment and fiber patching at the hubs. Each network port is independent of every other port, allowing for bandwidth on demand.
• The optical fiber cable plant is independent of network electronics, providing further protection against recabling woes.
• Buildings are cabled identically, with all active electronics in one or two satellite equipment rooms (SER). This consistency has been a great benefit to the care and maintenance of the network.
• 94% of students, 68% of faculty and 88% of staff are connected to CWRUnet. Professors have made the network integral to 300 courses, supplementing in-class instruction.
• Provides access to a campus-wide information system with electronic bulletin boards. These include calendars, course syllabi, homework assignments and previous exams for review. Students and faculty also have access to videoconferencing, cable television, the Internet, and the library's on-line catalog.
• Next step is to link CWRUnet with the local carrier's metropolitan network central to the university's plans to support distance learning.

Quotes:

"The maintenance cost is very small. There's less effort, less aggravation, lower cost. Others say they can't afford fiber. But ho long will Cat5 copper last? Why install cable twice when you know the choice will be fiber the next time." Ray Neff

"In the past, information in libraries was stored just in case. We are building the library of the future around the concept of information delivered just in time." Ray Neff

"We didn't know in 1988 that we'd be using ATM in 1985. But we had always planned on a broadband network, and that's what we have today. We guessed about the hardware, but we didn?t have to guess about the fiber. We know it was a stable technology. We buy the same thing today and we know it will work well for many years. Glass fiber lasts a very long time." Ray Neff

Fairfield University, Fairfield, Conn.

New or Rebuild? Rebuild

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

• Did not want to have to pull new cable every few years to meet increasing bandwidth requirements.
• A factor driving the installation of fiber to every desktop was Fairfield's growing data requirements, including
  • PC connections to all dormitory rooms and;
  • multimedia applications being developed by the university staff.

Installation Details:

The university's existing network consisted of outdated technologies that could easily be scrapped, making the transition to an all-fiber LAN easier. The network had included 300 "dumb" terminals connected to a Digital Equipment Corp. VAX and 400 PCs, many of them stand-alone.

That environment was changing rapidly. Starting next year, the university will require that students have PCs in their dorm rooms. That means a minimum of 1,000 rooms with have a PC connection to the network. When the library, administrative and faculty offices are included, that brings the number to 3,000 to 3,500 fiber terminations.

20 faculty members are developing interactive, multimedia teaching aids, and another bandwidth hog will be cable TV. Last spring the university installed a CATV network with connections to student rooms and other areas.

The school also plans to use a new PBX to provide voice services to students.

Quotes:

"The installation of fiber gets us off the treadmill of having to recable copper every few years. It's guaranteed bandwidth."

"The electronics are less expensive today for copper than for fiber. But when you look at the cost when fiber is phased in, the difference is insignificant. Fiber is the cleanest way to go and it gives you 622 Mbps without compression or electronic interference."

"Our goal is to have voice, data and video resources - including CATV - available to everyone as just a standard resource on the backbone."

Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJ

New or Rebuild?

Rebuild/New: Rider already had a limited optical-fiber backbone connecting 10 buildings. The old backbone contained just a few fibers and was used primarily for e-mail, Internet access, library catalog access, file and print sharing and central computer resources and processing. It connected 3 or 4 LANS and operated at data rates of 10 Mbps using 10-BaseT Ethernet protocols.

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

• Duct space was very limited. "The conduit was built for a fiber install with spares. If we'd had to build a conduit for copper cables that would match the ability of fiber, the conduit would have had to accommodate twice the number of duct banks. Copper would have called for outside splicing; with fiber there was none. Fiber was a much cleaner installation.
• Needed the bandwidth and flexibility to support their current goals.
• Fiber installation saved time and money and reduced the risk of future problems with connections.

Installation Details:

Network links 39 buildings on a 353-acre campus. The project includes more than 8,200 ft of trenches and 38,000 fiber-feet of optical fiber. The fiber network totals approximately 10,000 connections: 4,000 data, 4,000 voice, and 2,000 video. Every student has a voice mailbox, an e-mail address and a central computing account. The new fiber backbone also allows for a robust intranet; fax server; collaboration services, including document management and discussion groups; videoconferencing; network printing; and integrated e-mail and voice-mail/fax messaging.

Backbone consists of cables containing 144 strands of multimode fiber and cables with 72 single-mode fibers. The distribution portion of the network uses composite cables of 18 multimode and six singlemode fibers to connect the backbone to individual buildings.

The network forms a dual-star topology with fiber connectivity to each building emanating from two hubs: one in the main computing center and the other in the library.

The fiber backbone offers bandwidth-on-demand to users across campus. The network provides both FDDI and ATM operations with data rates in the backbone running as high as 155Mbits/sec. Nearly all users have network level connections - either shared or switched 10- or 100 Mbps connections at the desktop. In a few cases, users have ATM speeds at the desktop.

Quotes:

"We wanted the network to improve the quality of teaching and learning, to improve student life, to improve administration, and to advance education at Rider during the next 5 to 10 years. Bruce Metz

"Using fiber definitely speeds things up. Fiber cable is light and small, and a plus where duct space is scarce. Bulky copper cable requires more excavation and additional ducts, adding time and expense to a project. We got into a lot of places were there was a space concern, but we easily put in a 24-strand fiber-optic cable. Fiber actually saved cost on this installation." Phil Oliver, Director of Operations at Oliver Communications Group Inc., Bordentown, NJ (Installer)

"Now if Rider wants to run video, the singlemode fiber is already installed in the composite cable. It would cost twice the labor to put it in later. So Rider gets the singlemode fiber practically for free." Bruce Metz

Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, Atlanta

New or Rebuild? New - moved into a new building

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

Had outgrown its network. LAN traffic had increased so much that a higher speed backbone was needed.

Lower costs for network components coupled with increasing bandwidth needs.

Installation Details:

10 story building with 8 labs, 10 classrooms, 160 offices, 160 work areas and 10 conference rooms: 1,572 network nodes. Several floors have individual Ethernet networks.

ATM site. Went from taxi to OC3 in three months. Next, OC 12.

Now using fiber connects to the office because NIC cards are more affordable.

Quotes:

"With desktop computing and video technology, we envision a great demand for images being sent over the network. The bigger the pipeline, the less congestion so it?s smart and economical to install fiber during the construction phase, rather than retrofit it later.

Proven success at School of health has led Emory to install fiber to the desktop in two classrooms at the Roberto C. Goizueta Business School Building. "The Business School will be 'future-proofed' with conduit to the amphitheater lecture tables in all remaining classrooms. This will enable the school to run fiber to the student desktop using a zoned cable approach, with a strong possibility of keeping all installation and termination in-house."

3. Fiber LAN Profiles: Education (K-12)

Guilford County School System, Greensboro, N.C.

New or Rebuild? New

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

Using Centralized Cabling approach to cable the school because this approach eliminates the intermediate wiring closets.

Installation Details:

Taking a six-strand fiber cable from one wiring closet to every classroom.

Quotes:

"Managing the LAN will be a lot easier because you don't have any points of failure. It's one strand of fiber from the main hub all the way to the classroom."

Richardson Independent School District, Richardson, TX

New or Rebuild? Rebuild

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

Sprenger concluded that fiber represented not only a better way to solve many of his current problems, but in the long run, it also promised a less expensive solution than any copper-based system he was offered.

"We quickly determined that thinnet Ethernet wouldn't work, given the layout of the campus. We had a daisy-chained network with cable runs up to 2,00 feet which meant we'd have to resort to multiple repeaters . . . too costly"

The building's ceilings, floor and walls are constructed of dense cement which effectively rules out thicknet.

Thinnet/thicknet were also ruled out because if a single point on the network goes down due to electromagnetic interference, a cable break or a broadcast storm, all users on the same bus are effected.

Cat 3 UTP was eliminated because they didn't want to be locked into a strategy limited to 10 Mbps.

In cost comparisons, Sprenger found that cabling compatible with the fiber-optic inter repeater link (FOIRL) standard for Ethernet costs only about 10 percent more than Level 4 copper, which has no upgrade path. Level 5 copper was actually more expensive than fiber, and there were no industry-certified Level 5 connectors or jacks.

Installation Details:

One of the largest school districts in Texas, with 58 separate premises.

A pilot fiber installation was set up at a 10-node library site at a school that had been experiencing equipment and user errors. The pilot was successful - it satisfied the concern over fiber installation & maintenance.

Sprenger's nine-member technical staff recabled the library in two days. A second trial installation in a different school library was completed in even less time.

Quotes:

"Considering the way networking standards are evolving so fast, we wanted to be sure we could support 100 Mbps FDDI in the future. With anything less than fiber, three years from now I might have to repull my entire cabling."

Sprenger characterized the final decision on fiber as being "penny-foolish and pound-wise." "We feel it is certain to pay dividends down the road."

Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools

New or Rebuild? Rebuild (note: rebuild means that a LAN was in place and it was upgraded with fiber; New means a new building that had nothing in place)

Why Nashville Public Schools Chose Fiber

• Economics: In the past year the prices of fiber optic cabling and network electronics have dropped a substantial amount. With the cost of fiber-based LANs now very similar to UTP-based LANs, school administrators have a greater choice when upgrading their networks and many are choosing fiber because it offers greater network longevity.
• New Applications: The school's new fiber-based LAN will enable students to better explore the professional world, because it facilitates streaming video as letting them take advantage of other emerging high bandwidth applications.
• New Applications: The school's new fiber-based LAN will enable students to better explore the professional world, because it facilitates streaming video as letting them take advantage of other emerging high bandwidth applications.
• Bandwidth: Students at elementary schools are true "power users", taking advantage of many of the advances offered by new learning applications. The challenge for network administrators is keeping up with bandwidth requirements. Fiber optic cabling offers greater "headroom" because of its high bandwidth. This allows fiber-based LANs to absorb the increasing needs of the schools without requiring recabling.

Installation Details:

The installation consists of backbone and horizontal fiber cabling. Small form fiber (SFF) optic connectors and high-density, low-cost networking equipment including work group switches, hubs and media converters were used. SFF connectors provided a significant advantage because of their small size, ease of installation and low cost.

The system chosen incorporates a gigabit-backplane with 4000 switches as the core for each of the district's 49 schools. There are a total of 5,760 drops. The fiber between the core and the classrooms currently runs 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet but could easily be upgraded to higher speeds simply by switching out the electronics.

The majority of the classrooms are equipped with dual speed mini-hubs that provide up to eight 10Mbps or 100Mbps ports. These switches in turn feed hubs in most classrooms serving up to 300 computers

.

Quotes:

"What many people don't realize is that educators and students are power users. They need bandwidth and lots of it, especially to handle the new multimedia educational applications that are coming down the pike. Several years ago we realized that our copper network wasn't going to be able to cut it for much longer."

"Copper cabling has far from the ideal properties required in elementary and secondary school environments. The 100-meter maximum link length that can be achieved with copper means that multiple repeaters are usually needed to cover the required distance."

Fowlerville Junior High School, Fowlerville, Michigan

New or Rebuild? New

Why Fowlerville Junior High uses Fiber Optical Cabling.

• Link lengths - By taking advantage of the long data runs supported by multimode fiber, network planners were able to consolidate electronics into a single, centrally-located wiring closet. This approach drastically reduced the amount of electronics needed for the installation and vastly simplifies and lowers the cost of network maintenance.
• Network longevity- School administrators realized that additional "headroom" would become essential in future programs and/or applications. This cabling system will allow for a quick and easy way to upgrade the system in years to come.

Installation Details:

The new junior high school has 32 classrooms and houses approximately 650 students in grades 7, 8 and 9. School administrators chose a centralized cabling network architecture with a switch serving as the backbone.

Within the building, a single, centrally-located wiring closet forms the heart of the network cabling plant, with multimode fiber links radiating from there to each of the classrooms and other areas throughout the building. There are at least seven network drops in each classroom.

The use of small form factor connectors was critical as it allowed large numbers of fibers to be terminated in a small panel space.

Quotes:

"We've got enough headroom to grow. With a classroom, you never know what's going to be taught, from year to year." Jim Tower, Technology Coordinator for the Fowlerville School District.

Mother Teresa Catholic Secondary School, Ontario

New or Rebuild? Rebuild

Why Mother Theresa's chose fiber optic cabling instead of Category 5e UTP.

• Lower Costs - When the school managers were in the planning stages, they looked first at Category 5e UTP because they assumed that fiber would be too expensive. Once they learned that that they could install fiber for the same price, they chose an all fiber system.
• Simplified Installation Methods - The use of small form factor connectors and the fact that they needed to pull only two fiber cables instead of eight copper wires to each classroom made the installation process for fiber simpler and less expensive than for copper.
• Bandwidth - Like most elementary schools, Mother Teresa's needed the bandwidth today to handle new multimedia educational applications. However, the school also felt that an all fiber system would help future proof their network and enable them to accommodate new technology and new applications five years from now.
• Link Lengths - The ability of fiber-based systems to extend data runs up to 550 m (compared to 90m for copper), meant that at Mother Teresa's MIS managers were able to use a centralized cabling design, thereby reducing the number of telecommunications rooms (TRs) required from five down to two. In addition to saving the money that would have been allocated to electronics, the centralized cabling architecture helped the school to reclaim floor space that would have been dedicated to the TRs.

Installation Details:

Mother Teresa's used a centralized cabling architecture with fiber used in both the backbone and the horizontal. Small form factor connectors were used throughout because of their small footprint (they are similar in size to the RJ-45 modular jack), and ease of installation (you can terminate two fibers in about two minutes)

Eight computers in each classroom are served by a two-fiber cable extending to the desktop.

Quotes:

"Five years down the road we won't have to readdress our wiring systems in order to accommodate new technology." "Compared to copper, the installation process is considerably easier and less expensive. Instead of pulling eight copper wires into a classroom, we're only pulling two fiber cables."

New York Public School 199, New York, New York

New or Rebuild? Rebuild

Why PS 199 chose to use fiber cabling instead of Category 5 UTP

• Network longevity - The school's technical committee chose fiber over UTP cabling because they felt that fiber would allow the school to future proof their network, preventing obsolescence.
• Ease of installation - Because public funding for the school's network was scarce, parents and administrators decided to build the computer network themselves using donated and discounted network and hardware. Installing an all-fiber network using small form factor connectors was judged to be easier to install than copper.
• Limited space: Because the school had never had a computer system, there were no existing telecommunications rooms. Deploying fiber cabling allowed them to centralize the electronics and minimize the number of TRs.

Details about their installation:

PS 199 is a progressive Manhattan elementary school with 500 students from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds. The school's mission is to empower students by combining subject knowledge with communications skills in every class. Until this installation, the school did not have a computer system. They faced the unusual challenge of installing a new system in an existing building that did not have telecommunications rooms.

Today, all classrooms and a library/media center are connected by a fiber-to-the-desk network. Students can call up library resources from the library and share them with their classmates. Reading and writing test scores for the upper grades have improved and administrators are planning to apply their technology to the math curriculum.

4. Fiber LAN Profiles: Museum & Laboratory

J. Paul Getty Center, Brentwood, Calif.

Contact: Patrick Gorrell, RCDD, Chief Designer, AIDCO, Inc.

New or Rebuild? New

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

• Bandwidth. The long-term bandwidth requirements of the campus could only be met with fiber.
• Economics. The immediate use of FTTD allowed for a CNA design that recovered more than $5 million in floor space savings. These savings were more than enough to pay for the entire cabling system.
• Reliability. Fiber has a proven track record of reliability.
• Flexibility. The selection of air-blown fiber made it possible to add new connections or make other changes literally in minutes.

Installation Details:

The Getty Center is currently the largest single-phase construction project underway in America. In all, more than 1,000,000 square feet are to be inhabited. Construction costs will top more than $1 billion.

The data network is a switched VLAN with air blown fiber supporting virtually all data connections. CAT-3 UTP is used solely for telephony.

Each desk top is initially provisioned with a 10BaseFL connection with ATM OC3 connections offered as a migration path for larger-scale users.

The data network utilizes CNA (Centralized Network Administration) to essentially eliminate the use of distributed intermediate equipment rooms (only 2' x 2' of wall space is used in place of the traditional closets). However, the design is compliant with TSB-72 in that the distance criteria are met, and an intermediate cross-connect point is established in the would-be closet locations.

When completed (late 1997) there should be approximately 2400 FTTD connections in use. Currently, approximately 1400 are in use.

Quotes:

"The Getty Center is a long-term investment in a major facility -- to match the permanence of this investment with a communications system that would be equally permanent meant that Fiber LAN Profiles was a must."

5. Fiber LAN Profiles: Industrial

J. Paul Getty Center, Brentwood, Calif.

Contact: Patrick Gorrell, RCDD, Chief Designer, AIDCO, Inc.

New or Rebuild? New

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

• Bandwidth. The long-term bandwidth requirements of the campus could only be met with fiber.
• Economics. The immediate use of FTTD allowed for a CNA design that recovered more than $5 million in floor space savings. These savings were more than enough to pay for the entire cabling system.
• Reliability. Fiber has a proven track record of reliability.
• Flexibility. The selection of air-blown fiber made it possible to add new connections or make other changes literally in minutes.

Installation Details:

The Getty Center is currently the largest single-phase construction project underway in America. In all, more than 1,000,000 square feet are to be inhabited. Construction costs will top more than $1 billion.

The data network is a switched VLAN with air blown fiber supporting virtually all data connections. CAT-3 UTP is used solely for telephony.

Each desk top is initially provisioned with a 10BaseFL connection with ATM OC3 connections offered as a migration path for larger-scale users.

The data network utilizes CNA (Centralized Network Administration) to essentially eliminate the use of distributed intermediate equipment rooms (only 2' x 2' of wall space is used in place of the traditional closets). However, the design is compliant with TSB-72 in that the distance criteria are met, and an intermediate cross-connect point is established in the would-be closet locations.

When completed (late 1997) there should be approximately 2400 FTTD connections in use. Currently, approximately 1400 are in use.

Quotes:

"The Getty Center is a long-term investment in a major facility -- to match the permanence of this investment with a communications system that would be equally permanent meant that Fiber LAN Profiles was a must."

5. Fiber LAN Profiles: Industrial

Susquehanna Pfaltzgraff, Co., York, Penn.

New or Rebuild? Rebuild

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

The UTP wiring in one office building could not be certified to 100 Mbps performance. "This limitation put up a red flag. Wiring is a disruptive process, and we wanted a wiring system that would serve us well into the future. For a company that wants to run lean, top-quality infrastructure is extremely important. We knew we had to investigate alternatives."

Fiber offered the inherent ability to support long-distance data transmission, faster speed, immunity to electromagnetic interference, protection from lightning, tolerance for extreme temperatures and humidity, security benefits and the bandwidth to take the company well into the future. All at a cost similar to copper.

Installation Details:

More than 500 internal customers in 19 separate buildings, some of which were more than 100 years old.

LAN needed to function in the temperature and humidity extremes common to an office and factory setting with kilns and without air conditioning. Long runs within the factory presented additional challenges.

Applications included CAD/CAM, office automation, e-mail, mainframe emulation and transport and access to other hosts. The team also set the standard of 100 Mbps data transmission capability.

Used a centralized cabling architecture - helped make the installation cost effective by eliminating the need for extra wiring closets where the distances were longer than 300 feet.

The network currently consists of 82 nodes at the Thomasville manufacturing facility (at a cost of $300/desk) and 45 at the distribution center. It is as fast at the desktop in the satellite facilities as it is in the downtown York campus nine miles away.

In addition to faster speed, the new network permits quick changes of electronics. The IS department can add workstations easily, knowing the required infrastructure is in place and users will receive identical configurations.

Maintenance is only required about once every two months, with most of this work being server related and not infrastructure related. Downtime has been extremely minimal.

Quotes:

"Fiber was our best chance for success with the least amount of installation interference."

"In less than one year, we've gone from old PCs with floppy drives to a 100-Mbps certified LAN. The performance gain and reliability are incredible. Our internal customers love it and our work has become significantly easier.

"We invested in a quality infrastructure. We laid the groundwork for the future and put a highly reliable system in place. Since the completion of the installation, we've had 99.999 percent up time. As a result, we have made our internal customers happier, and our jobs easier."

6. Fiber LAN Profiles: Government/Military

The U.S. Special Operations Command, MacGill Air Force Base, Tampa, Fla.

New or Rebuild? New

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

Operates under FDDI

Chose Fiber LAN Profiles primarily for bandwidth and security.

Installation Details:

Horizontal fiber cabling plant runs to 256 locations with the Special Operations Headquarters. The wall plate for each location contains six fibers: one pair of fibers for each of three FDDI networks. More than 100 workstations have initially been connected to one or more of the FDDI LANs. Many other workstations and PCs are connected via fiber to a separate Ethernet system. ON the user's side of the wall, color-coded fiber jumpers terminated with either ST or SC connectors, depending on the classification and media, run from the wall plate to the workstation.

For each user location the fibers return to the main computer room, "homerun" style, terminating in a set of patch panels. The design takes advantage of the long cable runs enabled by fiber to eliminate multiple communications closets.

All fiber terminations for the cabling plant (at the back of the wall plates for user locations and within the communications room) are made with ST-style epoxyless fiber connectors.

Quotes:

"The gap in costs for installing fiber and copper is closing. FDDI hubs still cost more than copper alternatives, but as far as the cabling goes, copper and fiber are virtually at price parity. Even the costs of fiber network interface cards are lower, dropping from $500 to under $200 in the last few years."

"The three networks installed here have both secret and top-secret classifications. Fiber lends itself to these highly secure systems. It?s nearly impossible to tap without detection and fiber does not radiate electromagnetic energy, which rules out a variety of eavesdropping techniques."

"These LANs include applications such as video, map-based graphics, and multimedia, where fiber's high bandwidth shines, so to speak. FDDI is well suited to these applications, as is ATM, which I understand the command has under consideration for the future."

"The horizontal fiber cabling arrangement will serve the Special Operations Command here for a long time. It essentially future proofs the installation. We put it in once, and eliminate the need to ever pull another cable again."

"That's the beauty of these structured network systems. The are easy to maintain, permitting our customers to quickly accommodate reorganizations, workstation moves and rearrangements. For example, if a person moves from one desk location to another, all the technician has to do is switch around some patchcords in the communications room. It takes only a few minutes.

The Materials and Manufacturing Directorate of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

New or Rebuild? Rebuild

Why the Air Force wanted Fiber Cabling?

• Bandwidth: The Materials and Manufacturing Directorate users conduct materials research with an array of graphics-intensive applications that generate very large files across the networks. Only fiber offered the bandwidth to transmit files of this size quickly and without errors.
• RFI/EMI Immunity: To ensure the integrity of the data, immunity to EMI/RFI was critical. This had been a problem with the Air Force's Cat 3 network.
• Long Link Lengths: The air force network spans five buildings and 19 floors. Each floor requires about 13,000 feet of 4-strand desktop fiber. Optical fiber can support runs of up to 300 meters at 100 Mbps, compared with Category 5e UTP links which can support only 100 m.
• Economics. After looking at the cost of installing a Category 5e system, the network manager determined that it would cost no more to install fiber, especially after considering copper's distance limitations and shielding requirements. In addition, using fiber cabling allowed the directorate to centralize its electronics in a single telecommunications room in each building. This allows the network to be built without multiple hubs on every floor, saving real estate and equipment costs while allowing flexible network deployment options.

Installation Details:

The Directorate had an existing Cat 3 UTP network that supported the lab's FDDI backbone and shared 10 Mbps Ethernet LAN. When considering an upgrade, Senior Network Manager Bryan Foster considered both Category 5 and multimode optical fiber for the network upgrade.

The Directorate's data network consists of roughly 1,300 network nodes distributed among five buildings, connected by more than 200 miles of cabling.

The new backbone supports existing FDDI devices, such as SGI servers, using media converters. The Directorate is currently evaluating gigabit Ethernet backbone switches from several suppliers, and will connect those devices to the system.

The network includes 19 floors divided among five buildings. Each floor requires 13,000 feet of 4-strand desktop fiber. Electronics are centralized in a single telecommunication room in each building.

Installation proceeded floor-by-floor, with technicians reporting a quick learning curve and no problem with the SFF connectors. Major requirements included setting up a system to test the installation using the FSET's existing test equipment. One of the advantages of the fiber cabling was that it could be tested simply by using patch cords that connect to any test equipment.

Quotes:

"We decided to skip twisted pair wire and go directly to fiber."

"Fiber cabling just made more sense as we looked ahead. Then there's cost. By the time you factor the money that you have to add to cooper in order to deal with its distance limitations and shielding requirements. Volition fiber costs the same."

"The terminations are fast and easy, and the cabling itself is about half as bulky as the other stuff we've used. The fact that it takes up half the space is a major feature-making installation that is much easier to work with."

7. Fiber LAN Profiles: Laboratory

University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.

New or Rebuild? New Wing, integrated with existing lab

Why did they use fiber vs. Cat 5?

Used both. The university installed Cat 5 systems to accommodate a large contingent of existing Ethernet networking equipment, but they expect the networking applications to shift toward fiber in the future.

Installation Details:

The Engineering Laboratory wing consolidates all the labs of the Mechanical, Electrical and Computer Engineering plus Computer Science under one roof. It connects physically with the existing Engineering Office building by a pedestrian bridge.

Currently the buildings serve about 60 professors, 250 post graduates, and 750 undergraduate students. In addition to the laboratories, which occupy abut 80 percent of the 65,000 net square feet, the building contains spaces such as study and common areas, and offices for the graduate students.

The building has a dual fiber/copper telecommunications cabling infrastructure. It provides one dual optical fiber port and one or two Cat 5 data/voice ports to virtually all work and study area positions.

The university centralized all the fiber connections in one main communications room. They expect this arrangement will greatly simplify managing, rearranging and moving work stations on the fiber portions of the network.

Each dual-fiber cable goes from the main communications room all the way to the workstation in one continuous length - without splices or interconnects.

Quotes:

"We've planned the building's telecommunications infrastructure to last 15 5o 20 years into the future. While only a small percentage of fiber-to-the-desk drops are now in use, we expect fiber-based applications to rise quickly." George Csanyi-Fritz

"Fiber offers us the capability to handle very high-speed computer communications required for multimedia, CAD/CAM, distributed computing and other bandwidth-intensive computer and engineering applications. It's also immune to electromagnetic interference, which is a concern in a building like this that contains heavy-duty electrical equipment." George Csanyi-Fritz

"Fiber doesn't have the same limitations on length as copper. Some of the passive links run 200 meters or more. We know they could run up to a kilometer in length before signals would start to degrade." Nick Fenger.

8. Fiber LAN Profiles: Hotel/Conference Center

Bally's Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada

New or Rebuild? Rebuild

• Flexibility: Fiber cabling made it possible for the hotel to construct, in minutes, impromptu networks that handle data, voice, video, audio, and other media at any desired speed.
• Economics: The fiber solution was at cost parity with copper solutions, both in terms of equipment purchase and from an installation standpoint. Using fiber also allowed enabled the team at Bally's to reduce the amount of space used by TRs..
• Longevity: Guests want 100 megabits and soon will be asking for an additional gigabit or even 10-gigabit transmission speeds. Fiber optic cabling will allow the network to meet the needs of future applications without recabling.
• Link Lengths: Fiber's 300 m supported link distance made it much easier for network planners to span the distances between meeting rooms, including a 26 floor riser.

Installation Details:

Bally's Las Vegas is the first hotel on the strip to provide fiber optic cabling directly to floor pockets in convention and meeting rooms. The hotel's meeting rooms are divided between the casino level, the South tower and the 26th floor.

On the casino level, there are 23 meeting and convention rooms with a total area of 120,000 square feet. The Grand Ballroom is 50,000 square feet and accommodates up to 3,340 attendees, and the South Tower is over 26,000 square feet. Additionally the 26th floor has a total of 30,000 square feet. Cabling was sent to and through all these areas.

Bally's can run over up to 64 channels on a single fiber connection and routing over Ethernet eliminates ground loop problems.

Quotes:

"Today, many of the hotel's more sophisticated guests ask us to assemble high-speed networks to handle presentations and data transmissions. They may need to, for example, deliver streaming video to desktop machines located all over the building or provide high speed Internet connections direct to desktops."

"Up to this point, every hotel on the strip had made do with copper cabling. But it was apparent to me, in eight years of working with it, that copper has some major disadvantages in servicing a major convention facility."

"The jacks route upstairs to a fiber optic jack field in the main control room. If we need to connect pocket 1 to pocket 13, we simply run a fiber optic patch cord from the connection from pocket 1, patch into a 10 Megabit or 100 Megabit switch, then come out of that switch with another patch cord to pocket 13. The result is a fiber optic highway between pockets 1 and 13 at whatever speed the client needs."