The Coghlin Companies are an innovation contract engineering and manufacturing leader. For nearly two years they have been upgrading the wide-area network, which is the network between buildings, replacing older T1’s with new Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) service carried by fiber-optic. With the reliability that fiber has to offer, the EVPL now provides data communications at 30 megabits per second which can dynamically be raised to 100 megabits per second! Speed and reliability like this provides us the opportunity to save money on hardware costs at various sites and the need for multiple T1’s for voice and other protocols.

An EVPL network runs on fiber-optic and is revolutionizing the telecommunications industry. Compared to conventional copper wire, optical fibers are:

• Less expensive – Several miles of optical cable can be made less expensively than equivalent lengths of copper wire.
• Higher carrying capacity – Because optical fibers are thinner than copper wires, more fibers can be bundled into a given-diameter cable than copper wires.
• Less signal degradation – The loss of signal in optical fiber is less than in copper wire.

What does this mean to the business? Well, nobody likes outages! No email, no Internet, no computer access is just not acceptable in our lightning fast environment. Fiber is less prone to outages and much faster which will give the Coghlin Companies the edge over others and enable seamless, accurate transfer of large data files and other online correspondence at warp speed.

Mike Barry
Information Technology Manager
Data Security Coordinator
Columbia Tech, A Coghlin Company