1. DWDM equipment RFP: The first shipment of ADVA DWDM equipment arrived on September 30. ADVA assisted with unloading and inventorying the equipment, which currently is
stored in the secured warehouse on Government Ave. ADVA has assigned a project manager. We will meet with him after the Internet2 member meeting next week to begin the detailed planning for deployment of the equipment. The main holdup in deployment will remain the construction of the fiber laterals to the campuses, to the Level3 POP in North Little Rock, and the new fiber hut to be placed near Van Buren. For the campuses where equipment will eventually be installed, we will be preparing a site preparation document.
2. 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.
3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: We are currently awaiting TWTC’s review of the current draft of the agreement with the City of Little Rock. Tom Carpenter, Little Rock city attorney, gave us a brief progress update to say that TWTC is preparing a more detailed map of the existent fiber that will be a part of the agreement. We are very hopeful that the map includes not only the backbone metro rings, but also smaller rings and the lateral fiber routes that extend into North Little Rock and also southward along University Avenue. TWTC’s legal counsel is unavailable this week, so any further information from them will be delayed until her return.
4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent us his weekly status update on October 3rd. He reported having a very productive meeting with WEHCO Video, which resulted in them jointly establishing meet points for their fiber plants. Ritter has already begun construction on their end of the fiber to the meet point. David also sent me a redline version of the draft IRU agreement, which I have reviewed and will return to him later this week.
5. Suddenlink: I am still waiting for at least two proposals from Suddenlink for dark fiber. One offers a build of new fiber from the McLeod splice points to the ATU campus in Russellville. The second offers dark fiber accompanied with some construction from the ASU campus in Jonesboro to Biscoe, which is just east of Little Rock.
6. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Van Buren/MBO project (below).
7. Van Buren/MBO: We have a great development in this project. Our objective has been to identify a location where we can splice our MBO and McLeod fibers in the Van Buren area and build a fiber hut where we can install DWDM ROADM equipment. Scott Ramoly met with MBO on October 2nd along Hwy 64 between Alma and Van Buren and identified a fiber splice point that is very close to a splice point on our McLeod fiber that follows I-40 between Little Rock and Fort Smith. The two are amazingly less than 800 feet apart. On October 6 Scott received approval from Cox to use the MBO splice point. Scott has begun working with CT&T to engineer the short build and fiber hut construction. This necessitates the purchase of a small plot of land for the hut, but if we can make this work we will save hundreds of thousands of dollars in not having to extend our Little Rock to Fayetteville waves through Tulsa.
8. Juniper Routers: We have set October 17 as the cutover date for placing the Fayetteville MX960 into production. Steven Karp has been working with OneNet on the temporary use of a ten-gigabit port on their Tulsa router and one of our spare waves between Fayetteville and Tulsa to bring the MX960 online. OneNet has had some trouble with that router and has expressed some reservations about using the second ten-gigabit port and possibly triggering a recurrence of their router problem. I have suggested a slight modification to the plan to reduce the impact on the Tulsa router, but we at this writing are still awaiting feedback from OneNet.
9. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott met MBO at their POP in downtown Fort Smith on October 3rd to determine our options for getting the new fiber laterals from UA Fort Smith into the POP. It didn’t look promising, but Scott has a plan that he is working on with CT&T to build to splice points outside of the POP and to relocate the optical equipment from the POP to the UAFS campus. Also, Scott traveled to Conway on September 30 to meet with Conway Corp officials about the potential use of their poles for one of the fiber laterals to the UCA campus. The meeting was not very productive since none of the Conway Corp management was able to be present. However, the engineers who were present indicated that they might be receptive to building the fiber for us with attachment to their poles. We asked UCA to assist in getting another meeting scheduled with Conway Corp management present, which is currently scheduled for October 20.
10. NOC: Although we have not had the time to pick up discussions with the Indiana University Global NOC, we have had some internal discussions about how our clients can contact us in the event of a problem. We had an incident last weekend in which the OneNet Tulsa router experienced some problems, and while the UARK data center was able to reach me via my cell phone, we are considering a dedicated phone line that can be forwarded to the engineer on call. The campus phone system may not provide the features we need, so we will be considering some alternatives, including a VOIP service like Broadvoice.
11. DIS Peering: We will work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router after we have it in production.
12. Workshops: The BGP and routing workshop for the ARE-ON members is scheduled for this week, October 8. Cisco has provided generous access to their test lab and training facility in Little Rock for the day-long workshop. We have 21 people registered. 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.
13. SAU Magnolia DNS: Steven Karp and I are consulting with SAU Magnolia on setting up their own public-facing primary DNS server on campus rather than relying on their commodity Internet provider.
-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network
