January/February/March 2020 I 55
CASE STUDY: GUTHRIE CORNING
HOSPITAL—PASSIVE OPTICAL LAN AT WORK
To put POL’s offerings into perspective, consider Guthrie
Corning Hospital in Corning, New York. A newer facility
situated on 67 acres, the hospital opened in July 2014
and features numerous advanced healthcare technologies,
including electronic protected health information (ePHI).
In addition to dozens of patient rooms, Guthrie
Corning Hospital includes a 24/7 emergency department
with an on-site helipad, five state-of-the-art operating
suites and an on-site cancer center. It also offers extensive
outpatient care, including laboratory and medical
imaging services. To support the numerous technologies
and functions throughout this 232,000 square foot
facility, hospital managers decided to install POL.
The hospital originally sought proposals for a traditional
network but were open to any alternative networking
options that could be more cost-effective and more
efficient when it comes to requirements and physical
space. After designing a POL infrastructure for the hospital,
engineers laid out a comparison of the two architectures
and showed how POL potentially could save the
hospital budget dollars while reducing network space
and power requirements.
As part of the process, it was demonstrated that the
POL solution could be a simpler, easier-to-provision network
than an active Ethernet LAN. Because POL collapses
the traditional LAN architecture, it requires less equipment
and cabling while also converging voice, data and
video services onto a single optical fiber. Furthermore,
POL’s central management allows the hospital’s IT team
to make MACs more quickly and easily than would be
possible with a traditional LAN. Consider the following
additional benefits for Guthrie Corning Hospital:
Sustainability and Cost Savings: For the hospital, POL
produced fewer thermals than a copper-based active
Ethernet LAN. As a result, it could reduce the hospital’s
energy cost by as much as 30 to 65 percent. In
addition, its passive architecture required no power
within the optical distribution network. Because POL
needed less equipment than a copper-based LAN, it
reduced the amount of equipment required in other
power-related areas, including distribution and switching,
conversion, backup, fire suppression and cooling.
The Cost Savings Benefit of a Small Footprint: Guthrie
Corning Hospital managers also realized that POL could
conserve precious physical space, notably by reducing
cabling, floor, rack and telecom closet requirements. For
example, a typical copper-based LAN serving up to 2,000
users requires 90 rack units of space. Active Ethernet LAN
switches require one full rack for the switches and two
additional racks for terminating the large bundles of
copper cables associated with the switches for a total
of 18 seven-foot-tall equipment racks.
By contrast, POL can serve up to 8,000 users. Because
the OLT features 90 percent greater density than active
Ethernet switches, POL required only one equipment rack
and a total of 11 rack units within the equipment rack.
Furthermore, by reducing the amount of physical space
required, POL needed fewer UPS, fire suppression and
HVAC requirements, which in turn reduced overhead
costs. The PON splitters, typically located in the telecom
closet, were in a fiber distribution hub (FDH) mounted on
the wall, thereby reducing the required floor space even
more. By delivering all the above-mentioned cost savings,
POL allowed the hospital to achieve a significantly lower
total cost of ownership than with a traditional copper
based LAN.
Building the Right Healthcare Network: The primary components
of the network included the OLT and ONTs. The
team installed 4-port ONTs, which provided high power
over ethernet plus (PoE+) connectivity in 128 fiber-fed
ceiling boxes. The rack-mounted 24-port ONTs were
placed in communications closets.
The 4-port ONTs in the ceiling boxes feed copper
to all the Ethernet devices in the building, such as tele-
With POL, all networks can be
converged, including voice, video,
data, wireless, building automation,
building security and building
environmental controls.