DWDM solutions can be a great investment for college campuses that need additional bandwidth. They are reliable, require little to no maintenance, and cost considerably less than viable alternatives. While the benefits of the technology are readily apparent, choosing the right architecture for your campus can seem overwhelming. While simple point-to-point connections can be applied in some situations, additional problems could arise if your campus is more spread out.

This article features an architecture that can be a game-changer for connecting large campuses. It is called the Hub-and-Spoke Design.

The Hub-and-Spoke Design

To provide expanded bandwidth and connectivity to multiple sites on campus, we recommend exploring the Hub-and-Spoke architecture, as shown in the diagram below:

This design starts at a central office, or IT headquarters, with a 40-channel mux/demux connected to your core switches. The example above features a mux/demux with an 8-skip-1 channel plan that decreases the fiber insertion loss of the filters, allowing extended reach to the system.

All 40 channels are then muxed together over a single pair of fibers and sent across campus to a band splitter at a distribution center. The band splitter separates the channels into sets of eight, which are then sent to their respective locations; the various residential and academic locations across campus.

While this architecture is a useful framework for conceptualizing how to implement a passive DWDM system, settling on a specific solution requires a thorough understanding of your network environment.

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