Status Report - August 6, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 6, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment: The evaluation committee is meeting with the top three vendors on August 27 (tentatively) where we will get final presentations, Q&A, and a best & final offer using our latest network design. The committee will meet immediately after the presentations to score the proposals with the intent to make a final recommendation.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: After getting the word from AT&T that we were not going to be able to use their fiber, I got McLeod to give us a quote. It came in at $XXXX/strand/mile. Last year it was $YYY/strand/mile. I asked the rep to sharpen his pencil, hoping that we could get the $YYY price back, and didn’t hear back from him for quite a while. Last week I pinged him again, and he wrote back with a new quote at $ZZZZ/strand/mile. Maintenance is $AAA/mile/year. I asked him to draw up the paperwork, which will be a simple amendment to our existing IRU contract.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: The agreement is in Time Warner’s hands awaiting their review of the last revision from the City. We are awaiting the return of a Time Warner reviewer from maternity leave.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Ritter Communications 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 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: Scott Ramoly and I went to Tulsa on August 6 to meet with McLeod, AT&T, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, OneNet, and a City of Tulsa engineer about connecting the end of our McLeod fiber to OneNet fiber to reach the OneNet demarc at the OSU Tulsa campus. There were several options discussed, the most logical one being to take the ends of the McLeod fiber and the OneNet/INFO fiber into the AT&T building, but every indication is that AT&T may be a roadblock. It’s apparently a ILEC vs. CLEC issue. We may be able to get around this telco regulation stuff by approaching AT&T as two higher ed networks needing connectivity. If we get into a jam, we might want to get Kevin Kremer, the AT&T VP that we met with last week to look into this for us. The Van Buren discussion (below) may eliminate the need for this cross-connect.

6. Van Buren/MBO: We have MBO fiber that goes from Fayetteville to Fort Smith to Tulsa, and McLeod fiber that goes from Little Rock to Fort Smith to Tulsa. We have initiated discussions with MBO about possibly tying these two together near where they cross somewhere in the Alma and Van Buren area. We have provided information to MBO and are trying to schedule a conference call with them this week to go over our ideas and listen to their solutions. If we can make this work, we can avoid having to light the McLeod fiber between Fort Smith and Tulsa and shorten the path that lambdas take between Fayetteville and Tulsa by a couple of hundred miles. We want to use cost savings in Tulsa to pay for this.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper equipment is tentatively scheduled to ship August 15 (for the smaller EX4200 switches) and September 1 (for the MX switches). Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia the week of August 18-22. The racks, fiber patches, cable ladders and fiber management, power, etc. for installing these have already been ordered and will be ready before the Juniper equipment arrives. We will immediately install the routers and schedule a brief outage to migrate our existing network links off the Force10 to the Juniper MX960.

8. Fiber Construction: The approval for the selection of McClelland/CT&T as the engineering firm came through Dr. Sugg’s office. We have a meeting with the company on August 7 to negotiate their fee and to get a contract in place. Facilities Management is driving this process, with our participation and guidance. As soon as the contract is inked, we will immediately start them with engineering the Fort Smith, Russellville, Conway, and Little Rock builds.

9. NOC: We have a conference call with the Indiana University Global NOC on August 7. We will work with them to develop a proposal for off-hours/weekend/holiday NOC coverage. The intent will be to have someone who can answer the phone, do preliminary vetting of the caller, do some preliminary troubleshooting, and notify the ARE-ON on-call engineer. The GRNOC may also do some alarm monitoring for us, but we might just as easily do that ourselves.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The three LifeSize units have been ordered. The LCD TV monitors have already been purchased. I will be selecting the stand that the units in our building will go on on August 7. I have a recommendation on a nice portable stand. I do not have an ETA on the arrival of our LifeSize units yet.

11. Cisco Telepresence: Steven Karp and I went to the Cisco office in Bentonville this morning to see a demo of their Telepresence Center. It’s really attractive technology. We talked with Cisco about the possibility of placing a unit on campus in a technology preview center. They felt that we might be able to get financial support from some large companies in the area and state.

12. iPhones: Ordered for Steven, Scott, and David. We will check them out to be sure that they work before we order Mike's.

13. 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.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON)