Fiber Optic Network Brings York County Schools High Speed Access-Choosing A Network
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Written by Colby C. Young
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Sunday, 08 March 2009 |
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Choosing a Network
Four YATEC member school districts are actively tied into the network. Central York has eight buildings connected, York Suburban and Dallastown each has five, and West York has four. The York City and Dover districts also are members of YATEC and soon will join the network.
The consortium's primary goal was to have a state-of-the-art network infrastructure. "We wanted to create a network with high-speed access, high bandwidth, high reliability and little to no lag time --particularly for Internet access," Evans relates.
The network provides native 10BASE-T Ethernet connections at each site with Internet access provided by dual-redundant T1 connections to network access points in Washington, D.C., and New York City. There are four separate OC-3 rings spread throughout the county, with a total of about 20 school buildings on those rings. Fujitsu Network Communications' FACTR SONET access and transport platform is in place at each school building, and each school uses a FASTLANE Ethernet LAN interconnection card set. The FASTLANE cards provide provisionable bandwidth, with the YATEC services running at 3 to 10 megabits per second (Mbps).
The Ethernet traffic is converted to ATM cells and transported across the OC-3 SONET access rings. At the central office, the traffic is terminated as DS3 drops on Fujitsu FLM 150 lightwave add/drop multiplexers (ADMs). The DS3 UNI (user network interface) signals are placed on an OC-12 backbone ring. The OC-12 ring connects to the BlazeNet ISP site, where an ATM switch and router converts the DS3 UNI ATM signals back to Ethernet frames and provides the Internet access connection.
Originally, the network design called for the school districts to buy a large number of routers. In this scenario, Hyperion would have handed off T1s to be carried back to BlazeNet. As the project proceeded, the school districts sought ways to cut their capital expenses. They asked Hyperion to take on the routing functions so they could pay for the service -- not the equipment. Hyperion worked with Fujitsu to commercialize the FASTLANE product with the FACTR platform. Because Hyperion wanted to offer voice service as well as data, the company was set on using the FACTR access/transport system.
Hyperion's Bob Guth, the project manager, points to increased reliability and higher bandwidth as advantages of FASTLANE and SONET rings over frame relay and switched multimegabit data service (SMDS). Cost savings is another benefit, since less equipment is required to hand off an Ethernet connection than a frame relay or SMDS connection.
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 08 March 2009 )
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