DWDM solutions can be a great investment for college campuses that need additional bandwidth. They’re reliable, require little to no maintenance, and cost considerably less than viable alternatives. While the benefits of the technology are readily apparent, choosing the right architecture for your campus can seem overwhelming. While simple point-to-point connections can make sense in some situations, what do you do if your campus is more spread out? This article features one solution that provides an alternative architecture that may be ideal for connecting large campuses.
The Hub-and-Spoke Design
To provide expanded bandwidth and connectivity to multiple sites on campus, we recommend exploring the Hub-and-Spoke architecture, as shown in the diagram below:
This design starts at a central office or IT headquarters, with a 40 channel mux/demux connected to your core switches. The example above features a mux/demux with a 8-skip-1 channel plan, which decreases the fiber insertion loss of the filters, which can help extend the reach of the system.
All 40 channels are then muxed together over a single pair of fibers and sent to a band splitter at a distribution center, possibly on the other side of campus. The band splitter separates the channels into sets of 8, which are then sent to their respective locations, e.g., the various residential and academic locations across campus.
While this architecture is a useful framework for conceptualizing how to implement a passive DWDM system, settling on a specific solution requires a thorough understanding of your network environment. Ready to learn more? We’re here to help.
