1. New staff: We welcome Diane Didier to the ARE-ON staff as Director of Administration and Planning.
2. DWDM equipment RFP: The acquisition of the ADVA Optical Networking equipment was completed on Saturday, September 27, with the signature of the agreement with ADVA and release of the purchase order by the UA purchasing department. The first delivery of equipment, a load of eight pallets, is planned for September 30. This represents about 30% of the total equipment. I have contracted with Facilities Management for use of a secured warehouse on Government Ave where we can store and deploy the equipment.
3. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: Now that the route survey for Monticello is done, I can now provide the information that we needed to place in the IRU document and will proceed with completion of the acquisition of this route this week.
4. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: TWTC has received and begun review of the latest draft. The City is at a particularly sensitive stage in the negotiation of the agreement with TWTC. The city attorney wrote on September 26 to say that he understands the desire for a rapid resolution, but he expressed concern that the involvement by others in our group might lead to complications and possible litigation, and thus incurring substantial delay. He suggests a course of action that continues to get TWTC’s response to the draft and a better understanding of their issues. In the meantime, UAMS and UALR have asked that we develop an alternative plan for connectivity to their campuses in lieu of a TWTC agreement. We have developed a preliminary route based on use of the Level3 fiber that passes through Little Rock, but it will be expensive.
5. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent us a brief status report on September 27. They have a meeting planned with WEHCO on October 3 to review their proposed agreement and engineering plan. Ritter is beginning aerial and underground construction at various points along the route this week. I have not completed my initial review of the draft of our agreement with Ritter, but will complete it this week.
6. Suddenlink: The SuddenLink representative called me on Friday. She will be supplying us with an alternative for fiber into the Arkansas Tech campus and for a route from Jonesboro to Biscoe. We will carefully review their proposals. They have expressed a keen interest in working with ARE-ON.
7. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).
8. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly and I met with MBO and Cox in Alma and Van Buren to identify splice points in the area where we might be able to splice our MBO fiber into the McLeod fiber. We now have two locations where Cox says we can splice into the MBO fiber, one in Van Buren and one along US64 between Alma and Van Buren. Scott will be meeting with CT&T to review the two locations and to make a recommendation on the one that best meets our needs.
9. Juniper Routers: Steven Karp has developed a preliminary plan for placing the Fayetteville MX960 router into production. We will utilize one of the extra lambdas currently available to Tulsa and a temporary 10G port on the OneNet Tulsa router to do testing and migration of the current path to the Force10 router. Steven has a videoconference with OneNet planned for October 3 to do more detailed planning, with a final cutover planned for October 17. Steven is also working with OneNet on potential direct peering relationships with commodity Internet providers, Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Steven is in California for Juniper training this week and will be back in the office on Friday.
10. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly continues to work with CT&T on route development. CT&T has contacted McLeod to get permission to use some mid-span splice points along several of our routes to shorten the construction. McLeod has okayed one of these in Russellville and Monticello. These eliminate some problematic builds in both of these cities and will lower our costs substantially. We are also approaching WEHCO Cable in Pine Bluff on a possible use of their fiber to eliminate at least one of the builds to the UAPB campus. In Fort Smith, CT&T is developing a northern secondary route into the UA Fort Smith campus. He will be meeting with MBO later this week to get into the Fort Smith POP to get information on getting fiber into the building. Arkadelphia still presents a problem. We have a good route from the nearest Level3 splice point to the HSU campus, but the secondary route that I had initially identified is not feasible. CT&T’s engineers will develop an alternative for us. In Conway we will be building two fiber routes into the UCA campus. I had a meeting planned for Tuesday of this week with Conway Corp on use of their right-of-way, but we will have to postpone the meeting due to scheduling conflicts. The Magnolia route planning is still pending discovery of a fiber route into the city. We have developed contacts with several companies between Monticello and Magnolia that we believe may present our best option for fiber into Magnolia.
11. ADSB Network: Steven has completed the migration of our offices to the new Juniper EX4200 switches and ARE-ON IP space.
12. 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.
13. DIS Peering: We will work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router after we have it in production.
14. Workshops: The BGP and routing workshop for the ARE-ON members has finally been scheduled. Cisco has approved our use of their test lab and training room at their offices in Little Rock on October 8, the day following the ARE-ON steering committee meeting. Steven and I will be team teaching the workshop. The objectives are to train the ARE-ON member networking staff on the BGP protocol and routing configurations they will need for interfacing their campus networks to ARE-ON.
15. ADVA RETAG: I am a volunteer member of the ADVA Research and Education Technical Advisory Group. We had a conference call this past Friday to plan for presentations that ADVA will be giving at the Internet2 member meeting in New Orleans.
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network
