School finds fiber a better choice: multimedia upgrade is an education for charter school. . - Cabling, Wiring and Enclosures - Central Educational Center Newnan, Georgia

Communications News, Dec, 2002

When the Central Educational Center (CEC) in Newnan, GA, was planning two new buildings, the IT staff faced a decision on netcabling systems. The unique charter school combines a technical college and high school on the same campus, delivering enhanced educational opportunities to its students. Its need to move large volumes of multimedia traffic for distance learning, video production and other applications made data throughput a critical consideration.

"We started a video production class and had seen video transmissions over the local area network (LAN) were hampered by the limited speed of our copper network," says Tisa Stripling, technical support director. "We were seeing a time lag between the sound and video caused by the inability of our network to handle all that data at once.

"We expected even worse problems when our planned teleconferencing and distance learning applications went into operation," she adds. "It was critical to address this issue in our new buildings because we intended to greatly increase our use of video. For all these reasons, we wanted to maximize the bandwidth."

CEC's business partner, Systems & Solutions Inc. (SSI), suggested a new optical fiber technology that offered the speed of traditional fiber but uses components that are less expensive and easier to install.

The quote for 440 drops in the two new buildings was $150,000, compared to $160,000 for CAT 5 cabling. The cost of the fiber switches was about the same, while the fiber network interface cards (NICs), at about $150 each, were more than copper.

The solution was based on Volition Network Solutions from 3M that consist of backbone and horizontal fiber cabling, VF-45 fiber-optic connectors and high-density, low-cost networking equipment, including fiber-optic workgroup switches, miniswitches, NICs and copper-to-fiber media converters. The system also includes specialty patch cables, and all the products needed to install, or evolve to a complete fiber-optic LAN.

The network configuration was designed to interoperate with Cisco 3500 switches in the CEC's existing building. SSI specified a telecommunications closet in one building, with eight Volition VOL-5000 switches that are, in turn, linked to a Volition VOL-900 gigabit routing switch that connects to the 3500.

The longer link-length capability of the fiber cabling-300 meters compared to 100 meters for copper-made reducing the number of closets possible, and allowed the fiber cable to be run directly from this single closet in one building to each classroom in both buildings, providing substantial space savings. The CEC ordered and specified that Volition fiber NICs be installed in 100 new Dell computers, and media converters were ordered to connect printers via fiber.

"The new fiber network eliminates the problems by perfectly synchronizing sound and video," Stripling says. "Students are able to upload and download large multimedia files onto servers in far less time, and students have seen improvements even in lower bandwidth applications, such as browsing the Internet and accessing databases.

"Getting our network up to speed also makes possible a move to a new thin-client architecture in which our applications will be stored on servers," she adds. "The advantage of this approach is that we can use less expensive client machines while we eliminate the need to maintain hundreds of computers throughout our facility.

"The biggest advantage of all," Stripling concludes, "is that we are preparing our school for the new learning environment of the future. Multimedia instructional applications are a natural for schools because they multiply the effectiveness of scarce instructional resources by allowing teachers to be in more than one place at a time."

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