Fiber provides Rocky Mountain high: wiring solution proves its worth through improvements in longevity and productivity - Infrastructure - Lakewood, Colorado

Communications News, April, 2003 by John T. Devenport

Boris Naschansky, director of information technology for Lakewood, Colo., made a convincing business case for using a new low-cost fiber-optic LAN in two major projects. His approach is now showing results in terms of network speed and flexibility for the Denver-area city of 145,000.

Born of the Colorado Gold Rush of the 1860s, this Rocky Mountain city completed a new city hall complex, called the Lakewood Civic Center, in 2000. Phase 2 of the effort, renovating the 18-year-old city hall for use as an annex to house the police department, municipal courts and the information technology department is nearing completion.

"I was concerned about the performance, the ease of installation and the longevity of the system," Naschansky says. He overcame objections to a fiber-to-the-desktop system by some city officials by simple economics: comparing the cost of fiber's projected 20-year lifespan to the certainty of recabling a copper-only cabling system in four to five years. City officials bought in to the project.

Lakewood's Phase 1 civic center contractor installed cabling for more than 300 drops using 3M Volition-brand products. City employees experienced higher performance when they logged into the new system after moving into the new facility in March 2000, according to Naschansky. "The 15% estimated greater Phase 1 cost over copper-only alternatives was well worth the greater performance and longevity," he says.

When planning for Phase 2, Naschansky again wanted high performance with long-term viability. "With more than 320 drops, the ease and speed of installation was important," he says, "especially considering that renovation would have to take place around police, court and information technology operations, which would continue performing daily business in the building during the process."

Lakewood's contractor installed a complete end-to-end solution from 3M, including fiber optics for data and Category 5e copper cable for voice communications. To the desktop, Naschansky specified a combination of Volition network interface cards and media converters for existing and new PCs and laptops.

"The total installed cost in the Phase 2 renovation has been comparable to that of copper products," offers Naschansky, "including the network switch electronics, but with the added benefits of fiber. The component costs also were less than other fiber components we considered.

"The greater bandwidth of the fiber-optic system helped us avoid the need to split the network into subnets or move the data center to a new location," explains Naschansky. "Fiber provides longer runs-300 to 500 meters-than the 100-meter maximum for twisted-pair copper wiring.

"Using this system gave us an instant gigabit backbone," he adds. "This is going to allow us to do things that we could never seriously consider before."

The new system will allow the police department to share digital images between departments, making map information, mug shots and other investigative images more accessible to crime-analysis specialists.

"We have also started to pilot video over the network even though the video studio and data center are located in separate buildings," Naschansky says. This may include making TV segments, city council broadcasts and other videos available on request to city departments, and expanding broadcasts to the Internet in the future.

Naschansky is now considering running gigabit connections to servers for departments with greater consumption needs and running fiber to other city facilities, such as police substations and recreation centers. "Fiber is changing our game plan for the better," Naschansky says.

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Devenport is a writer based in Austin, Texas.