Fiber Installation Prepares Nashville Schools for Future - creation of fiber optic network for use by public schools

Fiber Optics Business, Feb 28, 2001

By installing fiber to nearly all of its classrooms, the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools has prepared its classrooms to handle the next decade's highest-bandwidth multimedia applications while solving interference and link length problems that bedeviled the previous copper cabling.

"What many people don't realize is that educators and students are power users," said Peggy Guy, coordinator of technology service for the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. "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 gong to be able to cut it for much longer,"

"Fortunately, we discovered that the prices of fiber cabling and network electronics have dropped to the point that we could install fiber for about the same price as overhauling our troublesome copper network. We got E-rate funding for the project and the rest is history. Now we can deliver streaming video to the classroom today and feel certain that we can handle whatever new applications are coming," Guy said.

Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools is the 49th largest urban school district in the nation. The consolidated city-county district covers Davidson County, an area of about 525 square miles. Beginning in 1855, Nashville became the first Southern city to establish a public school system. Shortly before city-county government was consolidated in 1963, an educational researcher at Peabody College for Teachers introduced a revolutionary program for disadvantaged pre-school children. Susan Gray's program became the prototype for Head Start, the success of which has been well-documented nationally. Approximately 83 percent of Nashville's school-age children attend Metro Public Schools. Its students generally outperform national and large-city averages. A nine-member elected board and its appointed director of schools provide the leadership for Metro Schools.

Guy said that the original impetus to install fiber cabling arose out of problems the district was experiencing with the copper cabling that it had installed in all of its schools. "Copper cabling has far from the ideal properties required in elementary and secondary school environments," Guy sald. "The first problem is that the schools tend to have a sprawling layout. The 100 meter maximum link length that can be achieved with copper means that multiple repeaters are usually needed to cover the required distances. Another problem is that the schools are loaded with older fluorescent lighting that often interferes with copper cabling. But most important is the limited bandwidth headroom provided by copper cabling. While Category 5 cabling can handle 100 MB without difficulty, a lot of uncertainty still exists about its ability to handle future generations. Even if these issues are resolved, higher speeds will probably reduce the maximum link lengths to the point that the copper will probably need to be repla ced anyway within a few years."

The Nashville district applied for funding through the E-rate or education rate program. The E-rate was established in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to provide discounts from 20 percent to 90 percent on telecommunications services, Internet access, and internal connections for all public and private schools and public libraries. The amounts saved through the discounts are to be invested in technology improvements. As of 1999, Tennessee schools had received a total of $6.3 million in E-rate funding.

"The universal service discounts will help bridge the digital gap between our wealthiest and poorest schools, and bring the wonders of technology to those who otherwise could not afford it," former Tennessee State Education Commissioner, Jane Walters, said. "We are pleased to see that both urban and rural Tennessee school systems qualified for the discounts during the most recent waves of E-rate commitments."

The next step was to find a fiber cabling system that would meet the district's performance requirements while staying within the limits of available funding. Guy asked Beacon Technologies, of Nashville, to help them select a cabling system that would provide bandwidth for the future and rock solid stability at the lowest possible cost. Bill Hapner, CEO of Beacon, examined the available fiber systems.

"The Nashville schools had some experience in the past with an ST connector-based fiber system" Hapner said. "But despite the high cost of that system, reliability was less than they had hoped. They were clearly looking for an alternative. Some of the problems in the earlier system were solved by using media converters from 3M to bridge the gap between traditional routers and switches and the new fiber cabling. These converters were just a small part of a complete end-to-end networking solution that the company has developed in the past few years. I suggested that they look closely into this system because it offers a dramatically higher performance-to-price ratio than traditional SC- or ST-based solutions."