The Central

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First online: October, 1999
Last updated: June 1, 2005

The Central
The heart of the entire system is a small room where the 100 Mbps single mode fiber connection to the rest of the world (I will describe the "upstream" later on) is connected to our three 3M fiber switches, and the incoming Cable-TV coaxial cable is coming from ComHem, who supplies us with both standard analog TV-channels as well as digital-TV for those who buy a digital box from them. Our luck and timing was almost total, because just when we needed it, 3M released their Volition-series of switches with fiber connections. In the beginning of the project we planned to have a bunch of Copper-to-fiber converters and regular Cisco-switches, but that was both more expensive and less flexible, not to mention not as COOL! The images are clickable!

The Central

The heart of the entire system is a small room where the 100 Mbps single mode fiber connection to the rest of the world (I will describe the "upstream" later on) is connected to our three 3M fiber switches, and the incoming Cable-TV coaxial cable is coming from ComHem, who supplies us with both standard analog TV-channels as well as digital-TV for those who buy a digital box from them.

Our luck and timing was almost total, because just when we needed it, 3M released their Volition-series of switches with fiber connections. In the beginning of the project we planned to have a bunch of Copper-to-fiber converters and regular Cisco-switches, but that was both more expensive and less flexible, not to mention not as COOL!

The images are clickable!


New picture of the central (2005-05-01).	New picture of the central (2005-05-01).	New picture of the central (2005-05-01).

New picture of the central (2005-05-01).	New picture of the central (2005-05-01).

This is the entire power-central. The four white boxes are "patch-panels" with fibers out to all houses on the backside and short patch cables down to the switches on the front. This is a normal setup, except that everything are fiber cables instead of TP-copper cables. The two upper dark boxes are 24-port 10 Mbps fiber switches (Volition 0215) and the dark box at the bottom is a modular Volition 4000-box with four Vol-4008 modules (8-port, 100 Mbps fiber modules).	The small gray box with "Bonet" written on it is a 100 Mbps single mode-to-copper converter. The single mode fiber is connected to our ISP Norrnod via Bonets network that they rent from Umeå Energi. The 3 feet cable from that box to the switch is the only (but what a shame!) copper in our central. It doesn't limit the speed, though. I have no problem running 70 to 80 Mbps through it.	The cable to the left is the 3 feet cable from the single mode converter. It is connected in the 10/100-slot in one of the two 10 Mbps switches. The cable to the right is the 100 Mbps fiber uplink to the Vol-4000 and from the Vol-4000 is another uplink to the other 10 Mbps Vol-0215.

Here you can see all switches in all of their glory! It is a really neat system!	A close-up on the 10 Mbps switches.	These colorful cables are connected to the houses in our block.

This is one of the CATV-boards with amplifiers from Cathrein.	I borrowed a picture from the sky over our block from Lantmateriet.com. As you can see all houses are separated by a distance of about 10 to 40 meters.	This birdhouse isn't connected to the 'net, but who knows what will happen in the future? :)