March 2005 — Applications
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Florida University Deploys Optical Wireless Solution
Barry University, located in southern Florida, relies on state-of-the-art communications to link the main campus in Miami Shores with its NAP (Network Access Point) of the Americas collocation (www.napoftheamericas.net) and 28 other campuses and satellite locations throughout the state - sharing online courses as well as vital registration and administrative data. In keeping with the university’s purpose to provide students with the highest level of quality education, its Division of Information Technology (DoIT) deployed a fully switched network environment with a Gigabit Ethernet backbone. Now, faculty and students are tied together through a variety of wide area network (WAN), local area network (LAN) and virtual private network (VPN) solutions.
However, continual expansion at the Miami Shores site created the need to extend the campus LAN to encompass two additional buildings outside of the university’s grounds and across city streets. Since connecting remote buildings to the campus LAN via fiber was cost-prohibitive, the DoIT team installed a Wi-Fi bridge to link the additional facilities. At first, the Wi-Fi bridge (based on 802.11b technology) was the answer. But when we began to experience reliability and performance problems, the DoIT team realized that 5-6 Mbps throughput on the Wi-Fi bridge delivered insufficient bandwidth. Thus, the university needed greater bandwidth and improved performance to meet its growing network requirements.
The Challenge
A campuswide move to an IP telephony system placed additional bandwidth constraints on overall network performance. Uneven reliability exacerbated the performance problems, prompting the university to explore other wireless alternatives. Jeff Majeski, now system sales manager for Crystal Communications (a systems integrator and value-added reseller), still remembers the first meeting: “Barry University wanted to leverage its Gigabit Ethernet network backbone and provide wireless broadband to the remote sites at 100 Mbps speeds.”
To that end, the university looked at
a wireless LAN (WLAN) bridge from a company that specializes in wireless networking equipment for Wi-Fi and broadband wireless networks to deliver the required bandwidth. Upon Majeski’s recommendation, they compared this company’s WLAN bridge to an optical wireless product from LightPointe Communications (www.lightpointe.com). Based on free-space optics (FSO) technology, the LightPointe FlightLite FL155 offered improved performance at a more appealing price.
Searching for Greater Value
According to Majeski, since only 450 feet separated the first building from the campus LAN, Barry University had an ideal optical wireless LAN connectivity application. “[The FlightLite] provides fiber-like bandwidth for highly economical point-to-point communications over short distances, typically up to 500 meters,” Majeski explains. “The FlightLite system could carry up to 155 Mbps of bandwidth through the air via line of sight to bridge the university’s LAN very economically.”
