Clark College Beefs up Fiber Network

Washington's Clark College has upgraded its network from 1-Gigabit to 10-Gigabit fiber.

The 13,000-student institution, with 32 buildings and three remote campuses, decided to partner with TE Connectivity and Cochran Electric to overcome bandwidth and distance limitations in its existing network. The companies "deployed 24-fiber multifiber push-on (MPO) trunks with Q3000 panels, 10-Gigabit MPO fiber blades and RMG series rack-mount fiber enclosures to support the upgrade," according to a news release. "New fiber was installed — 48 strands each of single-mode and multimode fiber per building — to provide redundancy and mitigate any downtime.

"TE gave us the infrastructure that would provide our campus with the greatest flexibility for the foreseeable future," said Patrick Taylor, director of IT infrastructure and security at Clark College, in a prepared statement. "We installed all new fiber, both multimode and single-mode, to handle anything that might come down the road. The ability to simply swap out a cassette in the closet to upgrade to faster speeds really future-proofs this entire installation."

About the Author

Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].

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