Status Report - September 1, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 1, 2008:

Labor Day Holiday Edition

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee met August 27 at the UA System Office in Little Rock. After presentations by the top three vendors, the committee met for over two hours to discuss the presentations. I had hoped that we would be able to do the final scoring and come home with a recommendation, but the committee wanted to get additional clarification from several of the vendors on a couple of items, plus tweak configurations that would enable us to better compare the proposals. I will release letters to each vendor, along with a form that our purchasing office will need to get an official best and final offer from each vendor. I had hoped to get these out on Friday, but will do so Tuesday. We will need to give the vendors one week to complete the forms and questions. The committee will meet by conference call next week once we have assimilated the information from the vendors.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: McLeod wrote on Friday to say that each of the splice points and collocation sites we were requesting has been accepted. I have to fill out order forms for each of these, which will be incorporated into the IRU appendix.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: There has been substantial activity on this issue in the past week. Our partners at UAMS and UALR have gotten involved to accelerate the negotiation of the contract between TWTC and the City of Little Rock. I suggested that Mike Abbiatti get involved to help protect ARE-ON interests, and he has. TWTC has agreed to bring their lawyers to Little Rock to meet face-to-face with the City’s attorney and legal counsels for the UA and ARE-ON. Jeannie Winston at UALR has been trying to coordinate the meeting for the latter part of this week (September 4 or 5).

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter informed me that they had an internal meeting scheduled this past Friday to prepare their request to WEHCO, a communications company based in Little Rock with cable TV services in the Wynne and Forrest City area that Ritter wants to buy an IRU for fiber between those two cities. David said that he would provide me with an update early this coming week. David also sent me the contact information for the person in Entergy that they have been working with for fiber into Little Rock. Entergy will be very busy over the next few weeks repairing damage from Hurricane Gustav, but I will still follow up on the contact.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).

6. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly has contacted Charlie Pickle from MBO to confirm our findings in Van Buren during our visit a week ago. We have also provided this information to McClelland Engineering (see below) for them to do a more detailed analysis of our options in splicing our McLeod and MBO fiber. As reported above, McLeod approved our use of the Van Buren splice point, and as long as MBO’s information has been accurate, we are very positive that this fiber build will save us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper MX switches should have shipped this past Friday, but we have not received tracking information from the shipment yet. Steven, Scott, and I worked at the Harmon parking deck to finish up the installation of the new racks and cable ladders in preparation for the new routers. Steven took time-lapse photographs of the work, which he will assemble into a Youtube video that we will publish as a part of this blog. The UAF HPC team generated a lot of interest when they did similar videos when the Star of Arkansas was installed.

(As a side issue, we have talked with Qwest about the internal order processing delay that added a couple of weeks to the order fulfillment before Juniper received our order. Qwest also shipped our EX switches with UAF contact information rather than ARE-ON's. Qwest is looking into the problems.)

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly, Steven Karp, Dan Street (UAF Facilities Management) and I had a meeting with McClelland this past Thursday. We handed over the updated laterals document that Scott had completed and described each of the fiber builds that we need. McClelland and CT&T will be driving to all of our cities to do preliminary analysis of each route for the purpose of producing estimated costs for each. I believe they will have this done within two weeks. This information will then be used to build a contract, a statement of work, and a preliminary budget sheet.

9. NOC: We were so busy working in other areas that we made no progress on reviewing the NOC services document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The LifeSize systems arrived last week. Steven, Scott, and I set the systems up, which we used in our first videoconference staff meeting on Friday morning. Mike Abbiatti took the third system home and has it working. When we have our Juniper EX switch setup for our building and patched into the Force10 router, we will move the systems to our own IP space. We will leave the systems setup with UAF IP addresses, too, so that they can be moved to other conference rooms in the building for campus use.

11. iPhones: I received my iPhone this past Thursday. I am happy about it except for one major thing, battery life. It’s abysmal, even after turning off the Wi-fi radio. The graphic keyboard takes some getting used to. Composing messages can be slower than with other phones due to the constant need to go back and correct typos. Otherwise, performance seems good. Having downloadable apps is definitely a plus. The Safari browser is definitely the best of any mobile phone on the market today and addresses the biggest problem we have had in viewing PNG graphic files. Steven has been reviewing ssh clients.

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 decided to postpone the BGP and routing workshop until October 8th or 22nd after seeing that we will have so much work going on with the delivery and setup of the Juniper MX routers to make a September 15 date unworkable. I have asked Cisco to check availability of their test lab and conference room in Little Rock for these new dates. Steven and I will team teach this workshop.

14. Document Reviews: I have reviewed the new ARE-ON member MOU and Management Council documents and am awaiting further input from Steven and Scott. I have a number of changes suggested for the MOU that will help clarify several IP address issues. I will forward these to Mike Abbiatti this week.

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