Status Report - 3 November 2008

Here is the ARE-ON status report for November 3, 2008:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: A protest was filed in the award of the DWDM equipment RFP. Substantial time was spent this past week in preparing the response.

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: A draft of the agreement between the City and TWTC was reviewed during a meeting of the Little Rock dark fiber users group on October 29. Most remaining issues are resolved, but one very important one concerning acceptable use of the fiber remained. The city attorney planned to have a meeting with TWTC later in the week during which he felt confident that they could come to a satisfactory resolution, but we have no word of the outcome of this meeting.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: The last update that we received from David Adams was on October 3rd. I have the Ritter IRU document in redline format, but did not make any progress last week in its review due to the busy schedule.

5. Suddenlink: No new developments. Suddenlink contacted me to forward alternative proposals for fiber builds in four of our cities, including Russellville, Arkadelphia, Magnolia, and Jonesboro-to-Biscoe. In each case Suddenlink proposed a combination of underground and aerial fiber, with use of some existing fiber in their plant. The Jonesboro and Magnolia routes are of little interest to us. In Russellville we favor the routes planned by CT&T, primarily due to both being underground rather than aerial. The same is true of one of the routes in Arkadelphia. Suddenlink is preparing a new proposal for the second route in Arkadelphia and possibly one of the routes in Russellville.

6. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: This project is on hold pending the outcome the Alma project (below). All indications are that we will not need any additional fiber in Tulsa and can ask OneNet for a refund of an IRU for cross-town fiber to reach their demarc at the OSU Tulsa campus.

7. Juniper Routers: We had one unplanned outage on the Fayetteville MX960 router around midnight on the morning of October 30. The router had an unusually high CPU utilization that stopped or substantially reduced packet forwarding. Steven Karp opened a trouble ticket with Juniper TAC after clearing the condition. Unfortunately, little information could be gleaned after the incident to give us insight into its cause.

Steven also had another trouble ticket opened earlier with JTAC regarding the BGP localpref problem previously reported. Juniper identified the problem as having been created when they implemented non-stop routing in the MX platform and will have a fix in an upcoming release of the JUNOS software. In the meantime we will disable non-stop routing on the MX960 to get the localpref functionality we need.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: Five companies submitted responses to the newspaper advertisement for construction manager. A meeting is scheduled on Monday, November 3, to select the short list of companies to invite in for interview. The weekly project status meeting with McClelland Consultant Engineers and CT&T normally scheduled each Friday morning was postponed to coincide with the Monday meeting. As a result we do not have updates on the progress that CT&T has made with the fiber routes planning, and the updates below may be a little dated.

Mike Abbiatti met with Dan Flowers, director of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, to initiate the request for use of right-of-way along controlled access highways. Following the meeting I contacted AHTD and supplied maps of the routes we needed. AHTD initially indicated that their policy restricts right-of-way permits to utilities only, but they have taken our request to their management for consideration.

a. Alma/MBO: CT&T has obtained verbal agreement from property owners between the MBO and McLeod splice points for easements that will permit construction of a fiber hut where we can install our ROADM equipment. Still pending are easements on the private side of the fence to the McLeod splice point, and one of the two fiber routes to the Cox/MBO splice point.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: After AT&T denied access into their manhole and conduit at the MBO POP in downtown Fort Smith, Scott Ramoly met with Cox and MBO to identify alternative splice points. One splice point north of the POP was found and okayed by Cox for our use, but the second splice point that Cox had on their maps unfortunately did not exist. They identified another splice point near the Midland Ave. bridge just south of its crossing over the Arkansas River. Scott plans a meeting this week with CT&T in Fort Smith to do route planning for both of these routes.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: We are awaiting final approval of the right-of-way along the I-40 controlled access highway before we can have CT&T complete their design of the fiber routes into the ATU campus.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: We had a meeting on October 20 with Conway Corp during which we discussed their possible involvement in building fiber into the UCA campus. They are looking into building the northern route (mostly aerial) and a possible southern route that uses SCADA fiber that they manage for the electric utility. Our alternative for a completely buried southern route would require that we build it ourselves. Another meeting is planned, but not scheduled.

e. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: Preliminary route selection is complete. We are awaiting final approval of the right-of-way along I-40 and I-30 controlled access highway before CT&T can complete the final route design.

f. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: Preliminary route selection is complete. However, we believe that WEHCO Cable may be able to supply at least one of the routes. I will be scheduling a meeting with them.

g. Monticello/UA Monticello: Preliminary route selection is complete. CT&T has been working on the final route design.

h. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: The preliminary route selection is complete. CT&T has begun route measurements. We are awaiting final approval of the right-of-way along I-30 controlled access highway before CT&T can complete the final route design.

i. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: CT&T has agreed to facilitate a meeting with the companies that we may be able to use to procure fiber between Monticello and Magnolia. This meeting has not been scheduled yet.

j. Little Rock/UALR/UAMS: CT&T has completed a preliminary route design and estimate for a route between two Level3 splice points in Little Rock through the UALR and UAMS campuses. In the event we are unable to use the TWTC fiber in Little Rock, this could be a viable route for connecting these two campuses.

k. Monroe/University of Louisiana – Mike Abbiatti will be meeting with Charlie McMahon of LONI to develop the MOU we need between our respective RONs. We should be able to use the LONI/Mississippi MOU as a starting point.

9. NOC: We made no progress on this project.

10. DIS Peering: We still plan to work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router.

11. SAU Magnolia DNS: Steven Karp continues to assist SAU Magnolia in setting up their own public-facing primary DNS server on campus rather than relying on their commodity Internet provider.

12. HPC: Steven Karp traveled to Jonesboro on October 21-22 to discuss High Performance Computing, mass storage, and how ARE-ON may be able to facilitate statewide needs for these resources. Following the trip Steven was able to assist the HPC group in Fayetteville on improving file transfer speeds. We anticipate continued need to assist groups at our campuses on network performance issues that appear at the application level.

13. Madison County Telephone: We met with representatives of the Madison County Telephone Company in Huntsville on October 23 to tour one of their self-constructed fiber huts. We have received specifications on a hut and plan to use these as a possible design for the fiber hut that we will need to build in Alma.

14. Training: Scott Ramoly attended ADVA training in Norcross, GA, last week. We will also be sending him to an outside cabling plant course in Albuquerque November 17-21.

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