Plexus - Fiber to the Home

Plexus is a system of 18 homes near the Bell Labs facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey; each home is connected to work by a pair of single-mode optical fibers. The system was lit using FDDI, running at 100Mb/sec, in January, 1994. 10 of the homes were upgraded, in August, 1995, to 155Mb/s ATM.

The typical workstation in folk's homes is an SGI "Indy", a 100MHz Unix graphics workstation, with a GB of disk, 64MB of memory and a video camera.

Columbia middle school in Berkeley Heights, NJ was added to the fiber system in August, 1994, in collaboration with Suburban Cablevision, a Division of Comcast. The school has 48 PC's served via a 100Mb/s FDDI link to Bell Labs. The High and Middle schools of New Providence, NJ were added in September, 1995.

Plexus also gives the homes and schools access to the Internet, the World Wide Web and the outside world at 1.5Mb/s.