College gets 1 Gbps between locations using Ethernet over a fibre optic link

Then the college installed a high-speed connection using the optical fibre network of Toronto Hydro Telecom Inc. The connection is Ethernet from end to end, so the two campuses look like they are on a single network. The move increased capacity by about an order of magnitude, to one gigabit per second.Now, says Joe Brazas, Humber’s director of enterprise technology, servers and other equipment – the majority on the northern campus, which is considered the main one – can serve both locations without bandwidth constraints. Students’ Internet access is all funneled through the northern campus without compromising performance.
The increased bandwidth has allowed Humber to keep up with increasing demands on the network.
“If we were to try to take the usage patterns that students (expect today) and try to fit it on what we had back then, we’d have a lot of unhappy students,” says Brazas.
The college also uses a small portion of the bandwidth to carry voice oer IP traffic between the two campuses, Brazas says.
The familiarity of Ethernet and the fact that it was the protocol already used in the LAN were major factors in choosing that route.
“The fact that it was Ethernet just made life that much simpler,” Brazas said. “We didn’t have to get into any conversions from one protocol to another. It’s as close to plug and play as you can get.”
And the service has proved highly reliable. Brazas says there have been few outages and those that have occurred have mostly been scheduled ones, as often as not related to Humber’s own equipment rather than the network itself.
“From all the equipment’s perspective,” he says, “it’s just another few nodes on the network.”