Tellabs (NASDAQ: TLAB) says that campus housing service provider Elauwit Networks has expanded its deployment of Tellabs' passive optical LAN equipment to five additional college campuses, following a deployment across eight colleges in 2013. Elauwit says it selected Tellabs' optical LAN due to its "scalability to easily meet students' growing bandwidth needs now and for decades to come," according to the vendor.
"Whether it's streaming high-quality video or simply browsing through online study materials, bandwidth needs of college students put campus networks under huge pressure," said Taylor Jones, CTO at Elauwit. "Following the success of the previous deployment, we knew Tellabs' optical LAN was the only way to future-proof college campuses."
The following Elauwit properties are included in the new POLAN installations:
Aspen Heights Corpus Christie, TX
Aspen Heights Fort Collins, CO
Aspen Heights Starkville, MS
Capstone New Mexico, NM
Capstone San Marcos, TX.
Tellabs' partner CORE Telecom Systems coordinated all logistics and support for the new deployments. The parties announced the new deployments at the recent ACUTA Fall Seminar (Oct. 26) in Boston, MA.
College students' bandwidth demands are a major challenge for any student housing network. Schools have to respond by increasing bandwidth to student residential accommodation, according to the 2014 State of ResNet report by ACUTA, NACUBO, and ACUHO-I. Tellabs' asserts that its fiber-based optical LAN system will provide the campuses with "virtually unlimited" bandwidth, capable of speeds of up to 101 Tbps, to support RF video and ultra-high-speed wired and wireless Internet services.
The company notes that its optical LAN approach is based on passive optical network (PON) technology adopted from fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments. Unlike the traditional copper-based LAN that requires more equipment and constant infrastructure upgrades to support more bandwidth and new services, Tellabs says its optical LAN can easily scale and keep pace with students' bandwidth needs.
Further, the optical LAN's compact design is a perfect fit for the cottage-style properties, adds Tellabs. It enables the bandwidth that has come to be expected in today's construction and bulk telecom projects, yet takes up 90% less space than legacy copper-based architectures. This makes the installation much simpler to manage, contends the company.