I work in a shipyard that is 19th century as far as telecom goes. It's served by a couple of 50 pair cables with a couple of T-1 lines for data. They need over a hundred phone lines and better data service, plus the ability to provide customers with short-term phone and data service to ships that are pierside or in our drydock. Some of the customers want Gigabit-level data service, along with the ability to have a block of phone lines with a call director for a secretary.
When I worked in Telecom 10 years ago it was fairly common to put a compact OC-48 box on a customer premise and lease them whatever bandwidth and configuration they wanted. I'm guessing the technolgy has progressed a lot since then.
What I imagine is a redundant fiber ring around the complex, with terminals in the main buildings and the shops where our CNC equipment is, and additional weather-proof terminals in several locations in our Syncrolift area, our drydock and our pier space. We have a climate-controlled server room in our main building that would be termination point for the incoming fiber link. On one hand it would be nice to be able to run fiber to a remote box onboard the ship and break everything out at that point, but I'm not so sure that running exposed fiber is a good idea in a shipyard environment. Everything would probably have to be AC-powered.
There have been discussions with our carrier about bringing fiber in, so that part is probably doable. I'd like to get some pointers on what kind of equipment is available that might meet our needs, as well as an idea of the cost. I'm thinking that an OC-12 might be enough, but would consider an OC-48 if the equipment wasn't much more expensive.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Marty