When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and millions of Americans were forced to work from home, Stanford University had a problem. Much of the university's staff lived on campus in faculty housing.

And unlike a typical apartment complex or single-family home, which might be served by a handful of local internet service providers, all internet service for the more than 1,000 faculty members and their families living on campus was provided by the university's aging cable network.

"We had about an 800% increase in daily meetings through video collaboration," said Rowell Dionicio, one of many network engineers at Stanford, speaking during Adtran's Connect virtual conference Tuesday. "With everyone working from home doing video-based training and instruction, it really created a strain for some of these people who were all congregated on the same infrastructure and in the same area."

Months earlier, Dionicio had been tasked with upgrading the university's cable network, which was capable of roughly 20 Mb/s to 30 Mb/s, to gigabit fiber. But with the onset of the pandemic and faced with a massive increase in bandwidth, his work took on a new urgency.

"We worked pretty quickly to try to get improved connectivity to these people in this apartment community," he said.

Luckily for Dionicio, much of the work had already been done. The university had been planning this upgrade for some time and had already run fiber to many of the residences; it just needed to be hooked up.

Dionicio settled on rolling out a gigabit passive optical network (GPON) after realizing the sheer number of switch ports that would have been required to support an active optical network for so many residences.

"If I were to use our existing [Ethernet] infrastructure — the same one we use on campus — how much of that would I have to get? So, we were talking about a lot of port count," he said, adding that serving all those residences would have required a considerable amount of hardware at a high cost.

"When I started looking into how other [internet service providers] were doing it, I saw that GPON was being leveraged quite a bit," he added.

Passive optical networks (PON) are popular among internet service providers because they don't require expensive switching hardware. Instead, PON allows a single optical fiber to serve multiple residences using passive optical splitters to divide up the signal.

According to Dionicio, each fiber run was broken out to 32 faculty residences. While a single fiber could have served more customers, he said the decision was made to limit the number of splits to ensure staff members could push as much data as they needed.

"A lot of them like to do research from their home and transfer large sets of data," he said, adding that some faculty would saturate their gigabit connection overnight transferring large data sets to other universities.

These connections were terminated using Adtran's optical network terminals either in the residence or in the apartment complex's network closet.

Dionicio's team has completed more than 1,000 installations, including more than 100 new builds in Palo Alto, California, thus increasing faculty internet service from about 30 Mb/s to up to a gigabit.