UWG News Archive

UWG goes to "dark fiber"

November 17, 2004

CARROLLTON, GA - Turning “dark fiber” to the light side is not some mystical convergence that will take generations to change, but it will soon upgrade the University of West Georgia’s technological capabilities.

The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia (USG) has reached an agreement with Georgia Public Web to provide dark fiber, or unused broadband resources, to 19 USG institutions, including UWG, said Michael Russell, director of Information Technology Services.

“Basically this will give us incredible bandwidth. That bandwidth is yet to be determined but it will be there,” Russell said. “It’s exciting because we’ll have a huge pipe and give us the capability for some interesting applications.”

The regents office of Information and Instructional Technology through the Peachnet project will be responsible for installing the fiber, said Bobby G. Brown, telecommunications project manager. “Dark fiber” refers to high-speed Internet fiber not in use. High-speed Internet fiber uses light to transmit digital signals at 186,000 miles per second. With more dark fiber, there will be faster and more communications capability for UWG.

Russell said that his department would have to trench up or bore under parts of campus. Eventually, all USG institutions will be connected in a giant local area network (LAN), which provides faster connectivity than in the present wide area network (WAN).

“With the increased speed there are all kinds of nice possibilities,” Russell said. “With a LAN, we can set quality of service and voice over IP (VoIP) because you carve out pieces of the bandwidth for telephone traffic, another piece for video conferencing traffic.”

Voice over Internet Protocol is a method for taking analog audio signals, like what’s heard on a telephone, and turning them into digital data that can be transmitted over the Internet.

How is this useful? VoIP can turn a standard Internet connection into a way to place free phone calls. The practical upshot of this, according to Russell, is that by using some of the free VoIP software that is available to make Internet phone calls, the phone company (and its charges) can be bypassed entirely.

Another possibility is segmenting bandwidth to the different UWG residence halls so that it doesn’t interfere with classroom or office Internet traffic, Russell pointed out.

“We’ve been talking about doing that for a long time but it’s been cost prohibitive,” he said. “But once you have that kind of bandwidth and cabling in place, it should be relatively inexpensive to do.”

UWG will probably be one of the first ones connected into the new network, Russell said, possibly as early as next year.

“Instead of being on leased lines and trying to route things, we can switch them,” he pointed out. “Because it’s all fiber, we can make communications much faster and much more reliable and easier to manage”.

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