Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1192126
January/February/March 2020 I 47 FIGURE 1: Legacy copper-based healthcare network design with 12 to 24 Cat 6A cables per room. Patient Rooms Patient Rooms Patient Rooms Operating Room Operating Room Nurse Call Station Waiting Room Radiology Main Data Center Therefore, many smart hospitals and healthcare service facilities are turning to passive optical LAN (POL) technologies to meet the high-bandwidth and high-avail- ability demands of life-saving services now and into the future. Passive optical LAN technology is the network alternative to meet and exceed the needs of ambulatory, behavioral, critical access, hospital, laboratory and long- term healthcare facility applications for the next 30 years and beyond. WHAT IS PASSIVE OPTICAL LAN AND ITS BENEFITS? The passive optical LAN is based on passive optical net- working technology, optical fiber cabling, and advanced Ethernet and is highly suitable for health care. G-PON and 10G XGS-PON are field-proven and mature technologies that are used to deliver commercial and mission-critical broadband services to millions of FTTx users worldwide. The POL architecture includes single centralized active equipment, referred to as the optical line terminal (OLT), and simple, passive fiber network thin-client edge devices known as optical network terminals (ONTs). The POL infrastructure uses fiber optic cabling that provides bandwidth measured in terabytes. As a flexible infrastructure, it also reduces network complexity and enables scalability and convergence of all services (e.g., voice, data, video) onto one single network. Because of POL's simple and centralized architecture, multiple distribution layers that are typical for the traditional LAN are removed. The workgroup switches