Schofield Barracks, located on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, is an Army installation and the home-base of the 25th Infantry Division. It occupies over 17,000 acres and, as of the 2000 Census, housed 14,428 military personnel and their families.

To help make certain that its training facilities were up-to-date and state-of-the-art, the Directorate of Information Management (DOIM), under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph J. Dworaczyk, recently improved the communications infrastructure at its main training location.

One of the division’s main training areas is called Area X. It is a location with more than 50 small, one-story huts. These huts are used by different units undergoing training at Area X and used by command teams, communications, logistics and intelligence units. In addition to the 25th ID, the facility is used by a number of units from other services.

“Because of the type of training being done at this location, the constant movement in and out of different units and using different structures for different exercises, there’s a lot of demand for communications services at that location,” said Bruce Hashimoto, Infrastructure Management Group (IMG) engineer for the DOIM, which is responsible for providing communications facilities at the base. It had previously been determined that Area X needed its communications infrastructure upgraded to more easily support constantly changing connectivity requests. The effort was championed by IMG chief, Daniel Munoz, who directed IMG resources in making the project a reality.

According to Hashimoto, the DOIM had several major goals to achieve with the upgrade:

• Improve their flexibility in using the feeder fiber to provide services to different groups in different huts

• Reduce the time it takes to schedule and provision services through a preterminated fiber solution

• Implement the new backbone quickly, using existing aerial supports

• Provide the necessary fiber connectivity to support training of soldiers using high-tech military gear.

“Users out at Area X use a lot of different equipment, and we have to support their network connectivity needs,” said Mario LaMaestra, deputy DOIM. “Units that go out there to train could bring anything from basic voice requirements to tactical field networks, and what we call reachback connectivity through our network to other remote resources—analysis tools, databases, connections to other units—that they might use in a specific training exercise.”

Given these requirements, and after learning about its unique characteristics, the DOIM team, in consultation with key users of the training facilities at Area X, concluded that Corning Cable System’s Plug & Play AnyLAN Systems provided the optimum solution.

Plug & Play AnyLAN Systems are preterminated LAN fiber optic cabling solutions designed to be installed three to four times faster per termination point, and up to 50 percent faster overall, than traditional field installations. Plug & Play AnyLAN Systems incorporate standard optical fiber cables, single-mode or multimode, that feature pre-installed tether attachment points (TAPs), which can be located anywhere end users need them placed along the length of the cable.

Factory-terminated and -tested distribution trunk cables, tethers and harnesses enable quick, reliable installation, and each TAP supports up to 24 fibers per location for added flexibility. It can be used in a wide range of network topologies, in both buried and aerial configurations. For Area X, they chose the aerial route, since there were existing poles, eliminating the need to trench or build a duct system.

The capabilities provided by the TAPs was one of the principal reasons the Corning solution was chosen for Area X. Prior to the Plug & Play AnyLAN Systems implementation, providing network services at Area X was more labor-intensive and required longer lead times. In the past, these limitations could affect planning for training activities by the units scheduled to use Area X, because they sometimes couldn’t be certain that they would have the data connectivity they needed, where and when they needed it, to carry out specific exercises. “This has been a sore point with some of our users out there for a number of years,” Hashimoto said. “There were lots of problems getting connectivity out at Area X.”

“We would have to run individual fiber cables from our Area Distribution Node (ADN), usually 12-strand, about a mile, directly to an individual hut and do the connection there,” Hashimoto said. “The Plug & Play AnyLAN System lets us put a feeder cable to the fiber hub and then do cross-connects right in Area X.”

The Area X network consists of six 72-strand aerial fiber feeders, ranging in length from 1,100 to 2,100 meters. The Plug & Play AnyLAN Systems feeder cables were pre-designed following specifications developed by the DOIM IMG engineer, who worked with a Corning Cable Systems systems engineer.

Hashimoto said the resources provided by Corning helped make designing and specifying the fiber elements easy. They worked with the installation contractor to specify each of the six feeder cable lengths. They also specified that each tether access point should have two six-fiber access splices (also called tethers). Then they specified where on each fiber cable the access points should be located, based upon an optimum spacing plan to serve the huts at that location.

Corning Cable Systems’ Engineering Services group provided complementary support, refining the network design and cable length specifications, and then the contractor used Corning’s Plug & Play AnyLAN Systems configurator to order the six feeder cables.

Hashimoto said that currently 17 huts have been connected with services using a Plug & Play AnyLAN System with 72 fiber access points, making it possible to quickly deliver fiber connectivity to virtually all the structures at Area X. Instead of running a large number of 12-strand cables from the fiber hub, the rapid cross-connect capability of Plug & Play AnyLAN Systems lets them run just six 72-strand feeder cables from the main distribution point through the site. Individual huts can then be easily supported from one of the TAP points.

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* Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

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