Status Report - September 15, 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 15, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The formal Best and Final Offers were opened September 9. We have an evaluation committee conference call scheduled for September 16 during which we will make our final selection and recommendation.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: Some of the fiber splice points in the McLeod network have changed with CT&T’s route surveys, which is affecting the documents that we are submitted to McLeod for this IRU. I am going to recommend to McLeod that we proceed with the IRU document with preliminary splice and co-location information, then follow with any updates as they become available later.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: I met with a group that included UALR, UAMS, Melissa Rust, Bill Kincaid, and the City of Little Rock on September 9. We reviewed the latest draft of the agreement with TWTC and created a new draft that everyone pretty much agreed upon. One issue that the City was unwilling to press forward on was inclusion of the cross-river fiber span into the Sprint POP in North Little Rock, which would be extremely valuable to ARE-ON. Upon request by several people at the meeting, I wrote an email to Tom Butler (UAMS) and Bill Walker (UALR) to ask them to appeal that decision to the mayor and/or city manager. Later, the city manager agreed to include the route into the agreement. The draft was revised and sent on to TWTC for their review. Jeannie Winston requested a face-to-face meeting with TWTC’s legal counsel to review the draft and explain our position on each issue. The TWTC counsel replied that there could be some delay due to the impending Hurricane Ike. This meeting has not been scheduled yet.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent me a status report on Friday. They had a meeting with WEHCO Video earlier in the week in Forrest City. WEHCO expressed great interest in the project and a willingness to participate. WEHCO is engineering the construction plans to the POP locations in the Forrest City area. I owe them contact information for Level 3 so that they can work through access issues into the POP, termination of the fiber, and on-going maintenance needs. Ritter needs the same from McLeod. Ritter has a draft agreement prepared and will send it to us for review this week.

5. Suddenlink: I received a surprise call from Suddenlink this week and talked with them about their new interest in working with ARE-ON on dark fiber into the ASU campus. Previous conversations with Suddenlink had been quite the opposite, so this is a big change. We are too far along with our business relationship with Ritter to reconsider an alternative, but I told Suddenlink that we would be very interested in finding a second redundant route to ASU. The best route for us would be Jonesboro direct to Little Rock, and Suddenlink is very interested in this route, too. It may not be in our budget to pick up another route to Jonesboro, but I told the rep that we would give serious consideration to a proposal that didn’t make us bear full costs for building the route. I also talked with the rep about Arkansas Tech’s interest in getting connectivity to their Ozark campus. I provided information on the location of the nearest fiber POP in our network, and she is going to investigate what it would take to get from Ozark into that POP.

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

7. Van Buren/MBO: We are still waiting on final confirmation about the location of MBO fiber in the Van Buren area. Preliminary information from MBO placed their fiber crossing I-40 in Van Buren. But they now believe the fiber crosses at the US71 intersection, which is 6.5 miles to the east. Scott Ramoly and CT&T have done a preliminary scouting trip to the area, but they will have to follow-up when MBO and Cox and give us more conclusive information about where their fiber is.

8. Juniper Routers: The 1G linecards for the Juniper MX routers arrived last week. Steven Karp installed them and powered up the Fayetteville MX960 and the three MX480s. The 10G linecards have still not arrived, but they should be here Monday. Steven will slot them up as soon as they arrive and begin the final configuration and testing. We anticipating being in full production on the Fayetteville and replacing the Force10 by the end of September.

9. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly started touring cities with CT&T to do preliminary fiber route analysis. Scott has submitted a separate status report with details, but to date they have looked at UAFS (Fort Smith), ATU (Russellville), North Little Rock Level3, UAPB (Pine Bluff), and a preliminary visit to Van Buren. They have identified several improvements to the routes that I found during preliminary planning earlier this year. In fact, we are finding more opportunities for buried fiber than originally thought possible, which may cost a little more, but will give us improved protection against fiber cuts due to storm or accident. Scott will be in Arkadelphia and Monticello this week.

10. ADSB Network: The EX4200 switches are installed, but Steven is working on a problem with a 10G port that might lead to getting a replacement chassis. All of the fiber between the Harmon deck and our building is patched, but we will need to follow up with cleaning one end of the link when we get the new adapter for our fiber scopes. We plan to start transitioning our offices over to the new network (and thus new IP addresses for our machines) beginning Monday.

11. 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. We were contacted over the weekend about a problem with local Cox customers experiencing high packet loss rates in communications with the UAF campus. We need to clarify contact procedures for off-hours and weekends with the campus operations group, which I will do on Monday.

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. I wrote to Rick Martin, DIS lead engineer, on Friday and give him the detailed IP peering information that he will need to set his end up.

13. Workshops: We are still awaiting approval from Cisco on the use of their test lab and conference room in Little Rock for our BGP and routing workshop. I told Cisco that October 8th would be our preferred date since it immediately follows the steering committee.

14. Quilt NOC Tools Workshop: We participated in this workshop on September 10 via videoconference, along with about 20 other sites. We got a number of ideas about new tools that we should consider as we build our own NOC. There were several presentations on portals that others have developed to give their users access to various tools and network information. We are considering WikiMedia, but Atlassian has a nice product named Confluence that I saw demonstrated at the Joint Techs workshop this past summer that I really like.

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