It’s been a long pull to upgrade the backbone of the communications system at EM’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
Workers will pull more than 137,000 feet of new fiber-optic cable through conduit to connect WIPP buildings, including the Central Monitoring Room, to computer servers.
The fiber-optic network, currently about 90% complete, promises to make the WIPP system faster, more reliable and more secure. All that remains is to connect the cable inside site buildings.
The new cable will boost performance of the site intranet, or internal network, between computers and servers because of the upgrade to single-mode, higher bandwidth fiber and faster switches.
WIPP has been operating on 10/100 Ethernet switches – that means a data transfer rate of 10 megabits per second to 100 megabits per second. The new switches are the latest standard, known as gigabit Ethernet, 1,000 megabits, or 1 gigabit, per second.
First developed in the 1970s, optical fiber is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass or plastic to a diameter slightly thinner than a human hair. Fiber-optic technology transmits information such as phone, TV and internet services as pulses of light through the strands. An outer layer, known as “cladding,” wraps around the central strand and causes light to repeatedly bounce off the walls of the cable rather than leak out at the edges, enabling the signal to go farther. Fiber optics is preferred because of its higher data transfer rates and transmission over longer distances.
Twenty times faster than cable, fiber optics technology is immune to electromagnetic interferences, has high electrical resistance so it can be used near high-voltage equipment, weighs less than cable, and is difficult to tap, which is important in a high-security environment.
