Meharry Medical College selects American Fiber Systems for Gigabit connectivity
April 13, 2004 Rochester, NY -- Meharry Medical College, the nation's largest private, independent historically black institution dedicated solely to educating health science professionals, has selected American Fiber Systems to provide its Freedom Ring full-spectrum fiber-optic network in Nashville. The redundant, diverse, end-to-end, all-optical facilities from AFS will provide Meharry with data connectivity between the Meharry campus and Vanderbilt University, and enable support for Internet2 (I2) capabilities.
I2 is a consortium being led by 205 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. I2 members are developing and testing innovative technologies that will enable completely new applications such as digital libraries, virtual laboratories, distance-independent learning and tele-immersion.
"The new fiber route adds to our ability to provide high bandwidth services and enhances the technology services we provide to our faculty, staff and students," Vicky Mosley, associate dean of Academic, Research and Clinical Computing at Meharry, said. "We believe the additional capacity we're adding to our fiber-optic backbone will provide for increased collaboration and better access to networks and applications."
According to Jeff Malone, senior director of sales, for American Fiber Systems in Nashville, the Meharry data network is built on a fiber-optic backbone and includes 2,200 network connections and 110 network switches. "We are extremely pleased to work with such an esteemed organization as Meharry Medical College," said Malone. "We're gratified to assist them in deploying the latest fiber technology available in the world today and the most cost-effective for data transfer. This technology, with its increased capacity, allows us to connect Meharry to the AFS backbone at the Gigabit-per-second level. Implementing our data transfer solution not only supports Meharry's current transmission needs more efficiently, it will also meet their future requirements for the applications and bandwidth associated with I2."
The AFS network, with the capacity to provide all optical access for over 30 carrier hotels and Bell South central offices, in addition to the downtown business districts and local business centers, covers approximately 20,000 fiber miles in the greater Nashville market. AFS has also deployed dark-fiber metropolitan networks in Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Cleveland. AFS has deployed over 76,000 mi of metropolitan fiber-optic cable since 2000 in several cities. The fiber connects to a city's most important points of communications presence, including incumbent local-exchange carriers' central offices and wire centers; competitive local exchange carriers' points of presence; Internet service provider (ISP) and data center locations; inter-exchange carrier hotels; wireless providers and cable company head ends; and Fortune 1000 companies. The metro service provider's networks connect to 400 on-net buildings.