Verizon working to transform Manhattan's optical network setup

Manhattan is one of the world's most prominent commercial and residential urban districts. However, it has recently faced somewhat severe limitations in terms of networking options because of aging copper cabling infrastructure. After Hurricane Sandy damaged the area, especially its underground cabling infrastructure, Verizon identified a unique opportunity to update Manhattan's cabling infrastructure without excess costs or business disruption. According to a recent Lightwave report, Verizon's efforts have already led to the installation of a fiber backbone and will continue with fiber-optic cabling being placed in many commercial and residential building.

Implementing fiber in Manhattan
Martin Burvill, senior vice president of global operations for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, told the news source that the efforts to deploy more advanced networks in Manhattan are the first of their kind, as the pace of implementation has been incredibly fast.

""Block-by-block, building-by-building, we are completely transforming the infrastructure of this vibrant and key part of New York City," Burvill told Lightwave. "This dramatic a transformation effort in just three short months is unprecedented, and we have done an incredible amount of work in a very short amount of time to get our customers up and running as soon as possible.  There is much more work to do, but when we are done our customers in lower Manhattan will have one of the most advanced communications networks in the world."

Burvill went on to tell the news source that while much of the backhaul work is finished, there is still a lot to be done in reaching upper floors of buildings and completing other internal optical network installation. This process represents a considerable challenge because each building is managed by different realtors that have control over when and how the company goes about installing new network systems. As a result, the project requires collaboration between the telecom, realty companies, building managers or owners, community officials and city government.

Taking advantage of fiber in multi-unit dwellings
Recent advances in fiber-optic cabling have made installation in multi-unit buildings easier. In the past, the inflexible nature of optical wires made it difficult to reach multiple units in a structure. More flexible cables are simplifying installation, making such projects possible. In this setting, media converters play a major role in ensuring fiber-optic cabling systems are able to interact properly with the copper networks that are still used within home and office units. Media conversion is becoming essential in connecting telecom networks with infrastructure in housing units as fiber becomes more prominent.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.