Status Report - August 18, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 18, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee is scheduled to meet on August 27 in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. Our intent at the end of the day is to have the final recommendation from the evaluation committee for awarding the bid. The schedule for the meeting is:

08:30 – 10:00 Cisco
10:00 – 11:00 AT&T
11:00 – 12:00 ePlus Technology
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break
13:00 – 15:00 ADVA Optical Networking
15:00 – 17:00 Committee Final Evaluation

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We have been working with the McLeod/Paetec representatives on the appendix to the existing McLeod Dark Fiber Capacity Services Agreement that will add the Little Rock to Monroe fiber route. We will have the list of desired splice point locations and diagrams to McLeod on August 18, which should complete the list of exhibits necessary to complete the appendix.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: I got another update this weekend from the Little Rock city attorney on the status of this agreement. He had received another draft from Time Warner Telecom, but his team had yet to complete its review due to other city business. I offered to meet with him when I am in Little Rock this Wednesday.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Paul Waits of Ritter Communications in Jonesboro on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked him for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: A meeting with McLeod/Paetec, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, AT&T, OneNet, and an engineer from the City of Tulsa was held on August 6 to determine how to connect our McLeod fiber to the OneNet POP at the OSU Tulsa campus. The plan was to splice OneNet/INFO fiber in Manhole 1081 in front of the AT&T building to our McLeod fiber in a different manhole in front of the same AT&T building. This necessitated bringing both fibers into the building, but AT&T closed the door on that option when it said that its policy prohibited connecting private network inside their facilities. We have tabled this to pursue a better solution with MBO in the Van Buren area (see below).

6. Van Buren/MBO: We have identified a splice point on the McLeod fiber at the I-40/I-540 exchange in Van Buren near where our MBO fiber crosses I-40. Scott Ramoly and I have another conference call scheduled with MBO’s engineer for August 18 to further investigate the feasibility of building a fiber hut and building fiber to splice the McLeod and MBO fiber. Doing so will potentially eliminate the need for McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa project above, plus it has the technical advantage of reducing the fiber route for our Little Rock/Fayetteville wavelengths by a couple of hundred miles.

7. Juniper Routers: Some of the Juniper equipment (the smaller EX4200 switches) have shipped and should arrive the beginning of this week. The larger MX switches are scheduled to ship August 29. Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia this week (August 18-22). The power and a portion of the cable ladders have been installed at the Harmon parking deck, plus the new Dell racks are on-site. The cut-tiles for the racks should be ready August 18. Scott Ramoly will complete the installation of the racks and final cable ladders while Steven is in class this week. Steven has been conversing with OneNet about the temporary use of a second 10G port on their border router to facilitate the migration to the new MX960 router. OneNet has been very helpful to us throughout our planning. They have agreed to do some special routing configurations for us that make our routing model work for the ARE-ON membership.

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: We anticipated having the preliminary fee estimate from the engineering firm of McClelland/CT&T last Friday (August 15) so that a contract and statement of work could be negotiated and finalized, but Facilities Management had not received the estimate at last word on Friday. I asked Bob Beeler of Facilities Management to get us to the stage where we could meet with McClelland when I return on Friday, August 22, to begin the detailed statement of work for planning and constructing the fiber laterals. Scott Ramoly has started working on updates to the documents that we will deliver to McClelland describing each of the fiber routes to be built.

9. NOC: As promised Steve Peck from the Indiana University Global NOC sent me a document listing the types of services that they offer. They are very receptive to building a proposal for after hours (night/weekend/holiday) coverage for ARE-ON so that we can be assured that our telephone will be answered by network engineering staff 24x7x365. Additional conference calls are planned. It is likely that we will have to put out an RFP for these services, although the GRNOC has some very intriguing unique software in their toolset that we are anxious to get our hands on.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The LifeSize units and TV stands should arrive the week of August 18-22. The timing on the installation should coincide with the installation of the new Juniper EX4200 switches the following week so that each of the two LifeSize units in our building will have ARE-ON IP addresses.

11. iPhones: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly received their iPhones this past week; I should receive mine this week (unfortunately, I will be out of town for most of the week). The browser on the iPhone has very good support for PNG graphics files, which is a major consideration for us switching to the iPhone. Many of our network management systems use PNG files for graphs, and these were simply unreadable due to extremely primitive support in the Windows Mobile platform. Steven is investigating a Secure Shell client, which is another important feature for us. Having mobile access into our equipment wherever we are without having to have a laptop will be very important to our responsiveness in a critical outage setting.

12. DIS Peering: We will be ready to move the Fayetteville DIS connection from the UA’s Juniper router to the new ARE-ON Juniper MX960 core router when the peering agreement is completed.

13. Workshops: We have gotten the okay from Cisco to use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for the Routing and BGP Training workshop that we are planning for the ARE-ON member network engineering staff. We will have date nailed down this week. Tentatively, we are looking at the third or fourth week in September. Steven Karp and David Merrifield will be the instructors for the workshop.

14. Listservs: New listservs for ARE-ON are now ready for use:

AREONMC-L = Management Council, closed list
AREONSC-L = Steering Committee, closed list
AREON-L = General announcements and press releases, open list (**)
AREONUSER-L = User discussion, open list
AREONNEWS = Technical alerts and updates, open list
AREON-EWG = Engineering Working Group, closed list
AREONSTAFF = ARE-ON Staff, closed list

(** The AREON-L list is being used for another purpose, but will be available by the end of August for open subscription.)

15. State Technology Council: I will be attending the first meeting of the State Technology Council on August 18 in Little Rock.

16. Director of Administration and Planning: Our engineering team had the opportunity to meet with and interview the leading candidate for the new position on August 14.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network