Chorus and N4L fibre to the classroom

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Starscream122

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#1898925 10-Nov-2017 14:22

hio77:

Theclaytons:

This might not be needed today, but will surely be needed in years to come. Getting this done now at no additional cost to the school is fantastic. I'm on the Board of Trustees for our local school and there is no money to allow for this kind of expense when it is necessary. There are more and more devices in the classroom and this is only going to increase in months and years to come with bring your own device.

Kids are making video presentations, streaming content and doing most things online nowadays.

Doing nothing would be a mistake (in my opinion).

Purely looking at it from a future proofing funding situation sure.

As @bartender pointed out, this would make routing LAN content difficult, you would need to be routing on each classroom, aggregating at BNG or such.

also need to remember the fibre is the cheap part.

the hardware to realistically make use of 1gbit within a classroom will easily set you back far more.

What's BNG?

yitz

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#1898927 10-Nov-2017 14:25

I'd imagine it'll follow the 'as a service' model, although the Chorus-wholesale/N4L-retail split aspect is interesting.

hio77

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#1898929 10-Nov-2017 14:27

Starscream122:

What's BNG?

broadband network gateway, where the connection is terminated on the RSP side.

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BarTender

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#1899045 10-Nov-2017 20:00

I forgot about one of the more important thing. You'll need an router to plug into the ONT. Normally they are a non trivial expense for schools and now you need one per classroom, with maintenance and support and be end of life in 5 years.
Not going to use a consumer grade HG659 or similar to be router and access point in each classroom. As that's just nuts.
There is a reason for having a LAN to manage local services inside your network.
Part of me thinks it makes as much sense as giving every student a 4G enabled device and do it all over the mobile network. It makes as much sense IMHO.

jnimmo

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#1899613 12-Nov-2017 14:35

May be similar to what Spark are doing at the Justice Precint in Christchurch, i.e. they're looking to provide a service which would replace all of the schools LAN infrastructure, using GPON internally.

Doesn't sound like a terrible idea especially if there are schools with unreliable or poor performing networks

Maybe would use some N4L hosted services, or Azure AD etc

I'm sure the ONT would be providing a layer 2 connection and any routing being done at the core (with Chorus equipment in the school or back at the exchange)

sbiddle

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#1899670 12-Nov-2017 16:33

jnimmo:

May be similar to what Spark are doing at the Justice Precint in Christchurch, i.e. they're looking to provide a service which would replace all of the schools LAN infrastructure, using GPON internally.

Doesn't sound like a terrible idea especially if there are schools with unreliable or poor performing networks

Except the SNUP project has seen the 2000+ schools in NZ have already had big $$ spent on them with core network upgrades to 10GB in many cases, new cabling and new switches. The WSNUP upgrade then saw wireless upgrades and installs occur.

There isn't an internal network problem in most schools that needs sorting.

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webwat

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#1907954 26-Nov-2017 13:05

sbiddle:

Tockly:

Hmm Gigabit to each classroom on a dedicated fibre. That'll be fun to manage!!

I really struggle to see the benefit of doing that, the management overheads in terms of firewalls/routers etc, plus the fact that hardly anyone uses a wired connection and everything is on wifi, seems to out weight any benefits.

Don't know of any enterprises that have a dedicated 1Gbps circuit for each of their floors for instance.

I too am a little puzzled by it - and while I was at a Chorus event last night where this was announced didn't actually get a chance to speak to anybody who could explain the benefits to me.

Many large school networks already have a 10Gbps fibre core and most smaller will have a 1Gbps copper core network. You've then got WiFi AP's in rooms already at 1Gbps to the network and no way to ever exceed that right now due to the limits of current WiFi standards.

I'm just not sure how the school architecture will work having an ONT in every classroom. It seems a rather strange thing to be doing.

No most smaller schools still have 1Gbps multi-mode to a cabinet in each classroom block, occasionally there is copper to a smaller cabinet but only allowed if the copper link is less than 37m including patch cables. Generally the backbone contention in each cabinet is up to 3Gbps to a stack of 24-port switches, but some cabinets might have better or worse. The uplink speeds don't really get to 10Gbps in the poorer high schools either.

Yeah not sure how Chorus plans to link a school-wide GPON to the existing network but I imagine the the same result could be achieved by adding a 10Gbps uplink to some new 10G link on the existing core switch, and an extra core switch goes in if the original has both 10Gbps ports full or if the edge switches need 10Gbps as well. I cant believe a school with 40 APs is supposed to get 40Gbps of bandwidth, so I would say they are just wanting to move the contention further up into the core network. Hopefully some of these schools have space to mount a new OLT in the main cabinet, and enough space to not damage the extra fibre leads trying to close cabinet doors!

Time to find a new industry!

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