AROONA serves a Municipality’s networks

The customer’s problem

To keep up with the citizens’ ever-increasing needs of high bandwidth, Frederikssund Municipality had to boost their network’s capacity. The connection had delivered 100 Mb/s over a 1096 meter OM1 (62.5 μm / 125 μm) multimode fiber (MMF) connection. Using 1310 nm boosters at each end, they could get the connection up to 250 Mb/s, but above that, the speed fluctuates tremendously.

Increasing need for high bandwidth

Frederikssund Kommune is a municipality on the shores of Roskilde Fjord in the northern part of the Danish island of Zealand. In 2007, the municipality was enlarged to include the old Jægerspris, Slangerup, and Skibby municipalities. It now covers an area of 250 km².

The seat of its municipal council is the town of Frederikssund. The town is connected to the peninsula of Hornsherred where the former municipalities of Jægerspris and Skibby are located.

“To keep up with the citizens’ ever-increasing needs of high bandwidth, Frederikssund Municipality had to boost their capacity between Skibby Library and the nearby Marbæk School. Up until 2019, the connection had delivered 100 Mb/s over a 1096 meter OM1 (62.5 μm / 125 μm) multimode fiber (MMF) connection,” said Network Specialist Brian Christian Andersen from Frederikssund Municipality. “Using 1310 nm boosters at each end, we could get the connection up to 250 Mb/s, but above that, the speed began to fluctuate tremendously.”

“AROONA is an interesting solution for multiplying both throughput and reach over multimode fibers by eliminating modal dispersion in the system. As the first MPLC customer in the Nordic countries, it has been an exciting task to help Frederikssund Municipality upgrade parts of their multimode network cabling infrastructure to prepare it for today’s and tomorrow’s capacity needs.”

Thomas Thorbjørnsen, Network Consultant, Itectra, Denmark

A complex and costly new fiber deployment

The municipality thought that the only way to gain additional bandwidth, after increasing the capacity with 1310 nm boosters, was to add a single-mode fiber to the path. That would have been very expensive when adding this to the cable duct. In close collaboration with Cailabs, Itectra designed and presented the passive AROONA solution to Frederikssund municipality. With this solution, the capacity of multimode fibers (OM1 – OM5) could potentially increase to 100 Gb/s over distances up to a few kilometers by eliminating modal dispersion in the multimode fiber.

To increase the capacity of the existing 1096-meter-OM1 link, AROONA boxes have been installed at each end of the fiber link between Skibby Library and the nearby Marbæk School.

“After a design presentation from Itectra, the passive set up installation of the 2-port AROONA-STAR and Reach Extender products was done during the local school winter holidays,” said Brian Andersen.

Facilitation of the renovation project

The AROONA-STAR solution allowed the Municipality to overcome the 100 Mb/s limitation of their OM1 MMF link. Based on the installation between Skibby and Marbæk – with increased capacity for 1 Gb/s connection – Frederikssund Municipality expects further extensions in the long term, including upgrading the same section to 10 Gb/s in the near future.

“Following this installation, the municipality – in collaboration with Itectra – is looking at installing AROONA in several other places in our network, where we have capacity problems on existing multimode connections,” Brian Christian Andersen continues, “It is extremely interesting to be the early bird adopter of a technology like MPLC in the Nordic region.”

About Itectra

Itectra designs and delivers business-critical IT solutions for the enterprise market, service providers and the public sector within municipalities, regions and public intuitions across all of Denmark, specializing in network optical infrastructure.
Since 2008, Itectra has been offering solution designs and consultancy for network and optical infrastructure with a clear focus on reliability, scalability and cost efficiency, working in close with leading manufacturers.