Aeres: fibre, wireless bridges and fourteen cabinets across a campus
The situation. A campus with classrooms, a workshop and a barn housing
livestock, spread across separate buildings. Three environments with almost nothing in common
except that they all had to end up on one network.
Fourteen cabinets, and why that is the right answer
You could try to serve a site like this from one central cabinet. You cannot, because of the
100-metre limit, and you should not, because every additional metre of copper is another metre
that can fail. So the site was divided into fourteen areas, each with its own patch cabinet,
linked back on fibre.
That also makes it maintainable. A fault stays inside one area instead of taking out a wing,
and someone working on one building is not standing in a cabinet that serves the whole
campus.
Fibre in the ground, and bridges where digging was not the answer
Between most buildings we dug in fibre. Between the ones where a trench was impractical we
used wireless bridges — a point-to-point link that carries the connection over the gap
without opening the ground. That is a real alternative when the route crosses something you
cannot dig up, and it is considerably faster to deploy.
Both approaches end up in the same place: a link between two buildings that is not the
bottleneck. Which one is right depends on the ground, the distance and what is in between, and
that is a decision to make on site rather than on a drawing.
Every connection has a name anyone can read
Over a hundred cameras and three servers run on this infrastructure. At that scale the
labelling stops being tidiness and becomes the system: every outlet, every cabinet and every
device has a name that says where it is in plain language, and that name appears on the patch
panel and on the floor plan.
Somebody who has never been to this campus can be told a name over the phone and find the
right port. That is the difference between a five-minute fault and a morning of tracing
cables.
First walk the site, then draw
We went round the whole campus before designing anything. A barn is not a classroom: the
humidity, the dust and the temperature are different, so the cabinet, the mounting and the
cable specification are different too. None of that is visible on a floor plan, and getting it
wrong shows up two winters later.
Could this be your project?
If you are setting something up in the Netherlands from another country, the first step
costs you nothing: we come and look, and tell you what we would do and what it depends on.
Call 036 52 98 447 or send us a message in English.
