ARE-ON Network Operations Blog

Status Report - February 16, 2009

2009-02-16T22:16:00.005-06:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for February 16, 2009:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: During the week of January 26th, Scott Ramoly and Steven Karp accompanied ADVA project personnel on site visits to almost all of the locations around the state and on the route to Dallas where ADVA equipment will be installed. Information gathered during these visits is being assimilated into a document that details the scope of work at each site that ADVA has been contracted for during the DWDM equipment installation that will take place during the summer. Due to inclement weather conditions, travel to some sites were not possible that week, so follow-on visits to those sites will be done in the near future.

On Tuesday, February 10, we had a major project kickoff meeting with ADVA during which we discussed the equipment configurations at each site based on the details of the site visits conducted so far. Based on the current network design, ADVA is confident that we will have sufficient equipment acquired during the RFP last fall to build the entire network plus light all the way to Dallas. Steven has provided ADVA with specifications for Eltek Valere FLATPACK2 systems for DC rectification necessary at campus locations where DC power is not available. In addition, we have provided ADVA with our preferred specifications on a number of other things that they will be supplying, including racks and cabinets.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: The paperwork for completing the Paetec/McLeod IRU agreement between Little Rock and Monroe is being processed, as are documents about colocation space, splicing into the Paetec backbone fiber, and the use of house fiber for entering the regen site in North Little Rock.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: We have a conference call scheduled today with TWTC regarding the agreement with the City of Little Rock. This will be an important call for us; we hope to have a better understanding of acceptable use of the metro fiber in Little Rock.

4. Little Rock: We have made the recommendation based on a variety of factors to proceed with the engineering and build of our own fiber in Little Rock to connect the UAMS and UALR campuses. This route would include diverting our Level3 fiber that passes through Little Rock through the two campuses, thus placing both campuses directly on the ARE-ON backbone. Also, now that we have decided to light the Level3 fiber to Dallas, along with additional work we are planning for Dallas, we can provide diverse routes for both campuses.

5. Ritter/Jonesboro: The Ritter dark fiber capacity agreement is currently under review by the UA legal counsel.

6. Conway: The Conway Corporation dark fiber agreement is currently under review by the UA legal counsel.

7. Suddenlink: I have contacted Suddenlink regarding the preparation of a formal proposal to build two routes in their service areas for us, including the south route to the HSU campus in Arkadelphia and the route to the SAU campus in Magnolia. We have a conference call scheduled for this Wednesday, February 18, to discuss the proposal in detail.

8. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: We are going to cancel any work for tying the Tulsa end of the McLeod fiber to OneNet.

9. Juniper Routers: Steven Karp worked with the UARK network group to place their new Juniper MX960 border router into production. All campus traffic to/from ARE-ON now goes through that router. The legacy Juniper M10 router is still running, currently handling the Internet2 traffic for UALR and UAMS, as well as the connection to the state network for UARK. The state network connection will move at some point to the ARE-ON MX960 in Fayetteville. ARE-ON will eventually take over the management of the M10 to eliminate the need for the UARK networking group to support the UALR and UAMS Internet2 links. Ultimately, as UALR and UAMS get their fiber link to ARE-ON, the M10 will move to serve other functions as long as it remains a viable resource and supported by Juniper.

10. Fiber Laterals Engineering: The selections of McClelland Consulting Engineers/CT&T as the engineering company and CDI as the construction manager for the fiber laterals construction project was reviewed and passed by a committee of the Legislative Council in their meeting on February 4th. The committee’s recommendation will be presented to the Legislative Council at their next meeting on February 20th. The McClelland contract has been signed and the CDI contract is under review by UA legal counsel. In the meantime, we have had weekly meetings with all three companies since the first of the year and have developed a project plan. The target of the plan is to have construction completed for all projects currently not on hold by June 15. Bids for subcontractors for Phase A are going out this week, with a pre-bid conference scheduled for February 18. These will be on the street about three weeks at which point they will be opened and an award or awards will be made. Phase A includes construction of the following fiber laterals: Fort Smith (north and south routes), Alma (two south routes to Cox/MBO splice and one north route to McLeod splice), Russellville (north and south routes), and Monticello (north and south routes). Easement documents that must be reviewed and approved by the individual campuses where fiber will be built are being drawn up.

Here are brief status updates on each of the fiber lateral projects:

a. Alma/MBO: The ARE-ON staff completed their review of the site. McClelland is wrapping up the last changes to the prints for the building at Alma. The five easements were signed and returned by the UA System Office, and as of last Friday, a sixth easement had been signed and mailed by the property owner. We have received preliminary approval from MBO & Cox for use of their splice point, but we are still awaiting the pricing quote for the work that Cox will need to do for the actual splicing. We have also received preliminary approval from McLeod. McLeod will pull the necessary highway permits for us, but will work with our contractor for the actual lateral build and splicing. This site will be in Bid Package A, which is being submitted this week.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: The ARE-ON staff completed their review of the site. The last corrections on the prints for the two routes to UAFS have been completed. We are still awaiting an easement document for a small piece of property at the Cox splice point near the Garrison Avenue bridge. We have received preliminary approval from MBO & Cox for use of their splice point, but we are still awaiting the pricing quote for the work that Cox will need to do for the actual splicing. The two railroad permits are still pending approval. This project will require relocation of equipment from the existing MBO POP in downtown Fort Smith to the UAFS campus. This site will be in Bid Package A, which is being submitted this week.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: The ARE-ON staff completed their review of the site. The last corrections for the two routes to ATU have been completed. We have preliminary approval from McLeod on the use of their splice points, including a mid-span splice point that we were originally unable to use. McLeod will pull the necessary highway permits for us, but will work with our contractor for the actual lateral build and splicing. This site will be in Bid Package A, which is being submitted this week.

d. Monticello/UA Monticello: The ARE-ON staff completed their review of the site. The last corrections on the prints for the two routes to UAM have been completed. The use of the two McLeod splice points are still pending the completion of the IRU agreement. This site will be in Bid Package A, which is being submitted this week.

e. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: CT&T is in the process of completing the engineering of the two routes to the UCA campus. The northern route consists of short pieces on the beginning and end of the Conway Corp fiber that we are acquiring. The southern route reaches to a McLeod splice point along I-40 in south Conway. CT&T predicts that preliminary route drawings will be ready by February 18. The agreement with Conway Corp is currently under review by our legal counsel. UCA has asked if they can join with ARE-ON on a portion of the fiber build for conduit that extends south of their campus, which we will try to accommodate if at all possible.

f. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: We have decided to not build the two routes from the McLeod fiber along I-40 into the Level3 POP. If the TWTC deal is consummated, we will build one route from the POP to meet the TWTC fiber somewhere in North Little Rock. Meetings with TWTC engineering staff would have to take place before we know where that meet-me point would be.

g. North Little Rock/McLeod POP: CT&T is working on the draft prints for this route, which should be ready this week. We have a pending agreement with McLeod/Paetec on the fiber entrance to the POP, which per their sales engineer will need to be via house fiber rather than our own fiber. The build that we will undertake is from the POP over to a nearby splice point on the Level3 fiber along I-40. Level3 has provided an estimate on the cost of their lateral build. The colocation agreement with McLeod is also pending review. We will be placing ADVA ROADM and Juniper router equipment at this site. It will be our major central Arkansas routing node.

h. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: CT&T is working on the draft prints for the northern route into the UAPB campus, which should be ready for ARE-ON review by February 23. An agreement with WEHCO Video for a separate southern route is still pending.

i. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: CT&T is working on the draft prints for the northern route into the HSU campus, which should be available for ARE-ON review this week. The contact with Suddenlink about the southern route is still pending. Level3 has given us preliminary estimates for the cost of building off their splice point near the intersection of I-30 and Country Club Road.

j. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: The contract with Suddenlink about building a route from the Level3 POP near Guernsey to the SAU campus in Magnolia is still pending. Prior efforts to find an alternate route to the east through El Dorado and Monticello have not been successful, although we hope that as a future project we might be able to acquire and/or build this route in order to round off a fiber ring for the southern half of the state.

k. Little Rock/UALR/UAMS: The decision point for use of the TWTC fiber has already passed. ARE-ON staff feels that this fiber will be of limited use especially as TWTC wants to put restrictions on its use. We have released CT&T to begin developing the detailed engineering plans for the preliminary route prepared several months ago. There is a major financial implication to this that will need to be addressed.

l. Monroe/University of Louisiana – We are awaiting the MOU with LONI before we can proceed with this project. LONI has just recently lost its executive director and may not be in a position to move the MOU forward yet. Mike Abbiatti is working with them to finalize the MOU and to place it before the LONI Management Council. In the meantime, we have approached the staff at the University of Louisiana, Monroe, about the physical facility. A site visit has not been scheduled yet, but will take place in the near future.

11. Dallas: As a result of a revision of the optical network design, there were sufficient savings in equipment already purchased through the DWDM equipment RFP from last Fall that will enable us to light the route all the way to Dallas. Site visits have already been made to the Level3 regen and collocation facilities. We have also solicited budgetary quotes from AT&T, Qwest, and Level3 for a 10-gigabit circuit between Dallas and Tulsa that will provide redundancy for all of the sites located along the Little Rock to Dallas fiber route (includes UAMS, UALR, HSU, and SAUM). One of the Juniper MX480 routers previous acquired and in use as a test machine will be deployed in Dallas to facilitate the circuit.

12. Arkansas One-Call & ARKUPS: The application for ARKUPS (the non-profit organization that will contract with us to do utility locates) has not yet come in. When we receive it, we will file it along with the application for Arkansas One-Call.

13. Commodity Internet: We have talked informally with Qwest, Level3, and AT&T about commodity Internet services. Now that we are planning to light the route to Dallas, we have many more options for CIS than before. We plan to put out a RFI to gather information about which companies can provide services and where their points of access are.

14. NOC: We have obtained a toll-free number and are contracting for an answering service to take trouble calls 24x7 and forward to an on-call ARE-ON network engineer. This, coupled, with some automated network monitoring, an out-of-band management network, and training that we will be conducting with select ARE-ON member institutions, will be our first start at a network operations center. This is a low-cost approach, which we will evaluate later to see if it is meeting the needs of the ARE-ON members or if a professional out-sourced NOC contract is called for.

15. DIS Peering: We still plan to work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the ARE-ON MX960 router.

16. Fiber Testing Tools: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly have had an opportunity to do some hands-on testing of the EXFO fiber testing tools with excellent results. The EXFO FTB-400 is a modular chassis that provides plug-in modules for various functions such as OTDR, power meter, CD and PMD analysis, etc.

On a personal note, all of ARE-ON’s staff was impacted by the ice storms that hit on January 26-27. Some of us were without power at home for over a week, and most of us have substantial tree and other damage at our homes. Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly were doing scheduled site visits around the state and into Texas during this time, and I want to take this opportunity to thank and commend them for their dedication to the project while their families were back home. We appreciate the patience of all as we work through the aftermath.

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

Status Report - 26 January 2009

2009-01-26T12:35:00.002-06:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for January 26, 2009:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: We have had several conference calls with ADVA regarding overall changes in the network design that accommodates changes in the design as a result of several factors, including more efficient use of the equipment that we purchased and relocation of equipment originally planned for sites in Little Rock/North Little Rock that are no longer going to be used. We also have completed the network design for UA Fort Smith and Alma, and were very pleased that the equipment purchased in the original RFP, plus a few parts trade-ins, has resulted in the ability to equip the Fort Smith/Alma sites and light all the way to Dallas at no additional cost.

Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly have been studying the power requirements for each of our sites where we will be installing rectifiers and batteries (generally, at the various university campuses). They are currently focusing on the Eltek Valere FLATPACK2 system. This equipment will actually be purchased and deployed by ADVA as a part of their installation related materials.

This week Scott and Steven are traveling the state with ADVA planners, doing site visits at every location where ADVA equipment will be placed, including campuses, carrier colocation facilities, etc. The information gathered from these sites visits will be correlated for the ADVA project kickoff meeting scheduled for February 10.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We have initiated the process for acquiring this IRU from Paetec/McLeod. I have a conference call scheduled for tomorrow morning during which we will go over any last-minute details before completing the quotation and final paperwork.

3. McLeod/Paetec: Along with the IRU agreement for the Little Rock/Monroe route, we are finalizing the colocation agreements for Ozark, North Little Rock, and Hamburg where we will have to install DWDM and routing equipment. We have also requested formal permission to use select splice points in the Alma, Russellville, Conway, North Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and Monticello.

4. Level3: We were able to obtain our entry badges for the Level3 colocation facilities this past week. Level3 has granted us unescorted access into all of the areas where our equipment will be located except Dallas. Dallas requires additional security requiring each of our engineers will to visit in person before we can get the unescorted access we need there.

5. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: We have no updates beyond the discussions with the City two weeks ago about further tweaks to the agreement language.

6. Ritter/Jonesboro: The Ritter dark fiber capacity agreement is currently under review by the UA legal counsel.

7. Suddenlink: We feel that the Suddenlink proposals for the south route to HSU in Arkadelphia and the route from Magnolia to Guernsey are going to be our best prospects for completing those routes economically. I will be contacting Suddenlink to get a final proposal and draft agreement to us this week.

8. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: We are going to cancel any work for tying the Tulsa end of the McLeod fiber to OneNet.

9. Juniper Routers: The fix for a problem that we thought was included in the 9.3R2 JUNOS code for our MX960 routes apparently did not make it into the code. There were several problems with non-stop routing that were to be fixed in that release, but the BGP soft reset issue still remains. We are awaiting the release of 9.3R3 where we have been assured the fix will appear.

Also, an attempt to bring the UARK MX960 into full production on January 18th was not fully successful due to a problem with the UARK border firewall. We were able to establish the eBGP sessions as anticipated, but the firewall was blocking traffic unexpectedly. We will make another attempt at a later date in coordination with the UARK network team.

10. Fiber Laterals Engineering: The UA Board of Trustees met on January 16 and approved the selection of the McClelland Consulting Engineers/CT&T team as the engineering company for our fiber laterals construction project and the selection of CDI as the construction manager. These approvals are pending review by the Legislative Council, which is scheduled to meeting February 4. In the meantime, we have been working with McClelland since last fall and CDI for several weeks and have a plan for releasing the construction RFQs and the actual construction at each of our target cities. We are pressing to have all of our fiber constructed by June 15, although due to the continued delays in getting the Time Warner Telecom agreement in place it is likely that the Little Rock construction may not be completed until some time in August. The UA Board of Trustees also approved a resolution that enables us to handle easement approvals through the UA System Office more expeditiously.

Here are brief status updates on each of the fiber lateral projects:

a. Alma/MBO: The five easements for the Alma area should have been signed by this time, but one of those requires a slight modification and we are awaiting a new signature from the property owner. The network design, including final prints, has been completed. Final last-minute changes are in progress for the small building that we will be constructing that the location to house a DWDM ROADM between the juncture of the MBO and McLeod longhaul fibers that are being brought into the building. We are awaiting approval from Paetec to use the splice point on their fiber along I-40. We are also awaiting approval from MBO to use a splice point along US64. This project will require relocation of equipment from the existing MBO ILA site in Chester.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: The final prints for the two routes to UAFS have been completed. CT&T discovered that we will have to obtain at least one small easement, possibly two, at the Cox splice point near the Garrison Avenue bridge. We have a pending request to MBO and Cox for permission to use their splice points. We also have two pending requests for railroad permits. This project will require relocation of equipment from the existing MBO POP in downtown Fort Smith to the UAFS campus. Scott Ramoly is planning the site visit at UAFS for this Wednesday.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: The final prints for the two routes to ATU have been completed. We are pending approval from Paetec to use the two splice points on their fiber along I-40. Scott Ramoly is planning the site visit at ATU for this Tuesday.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: Conway Corp has agreed to build a portion of the northern route to the UCA campus. We will have to build a short amount of fiber to connect to the McLeod splice point near the intersection of I-40 and Skyline Drive and at the other end of the cable to connect to the campus. The agreement with Conway Corp is currently under review by our legal counsel. CT&T has been directed to engineer the southern route to connect the campus to the McLeod splice point along I-40 south of Dave Ward Drive. We are still awaiting the preliminary route design prints for both of these routes in Conway. Scott Ramoly is planning the site visit for UCA for this Tuesday.

e. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: We have decided to not build the two routes from the McLeod fiber along I-40 into the Level3 POP. Although, once the Time Warner Telecom agreement is in place, we will have to build a route from the Level3 POP to a suitable splice point on the TWTC fiber in the North Little Rock area. We have not yet begun design of this route since we are currently restricted from talking with TWTC directly until the agreement is finalized. Scott Ramoly is planning a site visit for the Level3 POP in North Little Rock for today.

f. North Little Rock/McLeod POP: CT&T is working on the draft prints for this route, which replaces the two routes we had originally planned for joining the McLeod and Level3 long-haul fibers at the Level3 POP. It is a single short build along state highway right-of-way with a short segment that McLeod will provide into their splice point at the intersection of I-40 and I-440. We have decided that the McLeod POP will house our Juniper core router and an ADVA ROADM. We anticipate needing a single easement to cross private property to reach the McLeod POP, but the easement research is still pending. Scott Ramoly is planning a site visit at the McLeod POP in North Little Rock for Wednesday. We are awaiting approval from Level3 to use the single splice point on their fiber along I-40 near the McLeod POP.

g. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: CT&T is working on the draft prints for the northern route into the UAPB campus. An agreement with WEHCO Video for a separate southern route is still pending. Steven Karp is planning a site visit at UAPB for today. We are awaiting permission from McLeod to use the single splice point in the Pine Bluff area.

h. Monticello/UA Monticello: The route prints for Monticello are finalized. Steven Karp is planning a site visit at UAM and the McLeod ILA site at Hamburg for today. We are awaiting permission from McLeod to use the two splice points in the Monticello area.

i. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: We are still awaiting draft draft prints of the northern route from CT&T. The contact with Suddenlink about the southern route is still pending. Level3 has given us preliminary estimates for the cost of building off their splice point near the intersection of I-30 and Country Club Road. Scott Ramoly is planning a site visit at HSU for Thursday

j. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: The contact with Suddenlink about building a route from the Level3 POP near Guernsey to the SAU campus in Magnolia is still pending. Steven Karp is planning a site visit at SAU for today.

k. Little Rock/UALR/UAMS: Our understanding is that the Time Warner Telecom agreement with the City of Little Rock is very near resolution. Until we have an opportunity to talk with TWTC engineers about their metro fiber we are unable to do any further planning for Little Rock. Scott Ramoly is planning a site visit at UALR for today and at UAMS on Wednesday.

l. Monroe/University of Louisiana – We are awaiting the MOU with LONI before we can proceed with this project.

11. Arkansas One-Call & ARKUPS: The application for ARKUPS (the non-profit organization that will contract with us to do utility locates) has not yet come in. When we receive it, we will file it along with the application for Arkansas One-Call.

12. Commodity Internet: We have talked informally with Qwest, Level3, and AT&T about commodity Internet services. Now that we are planning to light the route to Dallas, we have many more options for CIS than before. We plan to put out a RFI to gather information about which companies can provide services and where their points of access are.

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

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

15. Fiber Testing Tools: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly have been looking at fiber testing equipment, including OTDR, loss measurement, dispersion compensation, and Ethernet testing. EXFO has come highly recommended, and they have the product to meet our needs. They are not inexpensive, however, so we are being careful to evaluate real needs vs. nice-to-have functionality.

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

Status Report - January 12, 2009

2009-01-12T12:06:00.001-06:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for January 12, 2009:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: The State Procurement Office completed its review of the ADVA DWDM equipment acquisition and ARE-ON is cleared to proceed with the shipment and installation of the equipment. We have begun meetings with ADVA on the actual final network design. Numerous changes in fiber routing and where we want to host our services have taken place since the initial RFP was released in March 2008. Last week we had a conference call with ADVA and learned that with a small amount of swapping equipment, we can do a lot more with the equipment already acquired than originally planned. This is good news to us since it enables to us add sites that were outside the scope of the RFP with no additional cost for the equipment, including Fort Smith and Alma, but also enabling us to light the path all the way to Dallas if we choose. We are currently working with ADVA on the final equipment list so that we can get the parts shipped as necessary. We are also working with ADVA on the early shipment and installation of the equipment racks for the campus sites where we will be building fiber. We need the racks in place in order to install the fiber patch panels that the construction contractors will build when the fiber laterals are completed.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We will wrap up the agreement with Paetec/McLeod on this route this week.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: We heard late last week that this agreement is very close to completion.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: The Ritter dark fiber capacity agreement is currently under review by the UA legal counsel.

5. Suddenlink: We feel that the Suddenlink proposals for the south route to HSU in Arkadelphia and the route from Magnolia to Guernsey are going to be our best prospects for completing those routes economically. I will be contacting Suddenlink to get a final proposal and draft agreement to us this week.

6. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: We are going to cancel any work for tying the Tulsa end of the McLeod fiber to OneNet.

7. Juniper Routers: Juniper delivered the fix to our non-stop routing problem in the latest release of their JUNOS operating system. Steven installed this version in the Fayetteville M960 on January 2, 2009.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: The approval of our selection of the construction manager is still pending. The UA Board of Trustees is meeting this Friday, January 16, and the approval is on their agenda. Also, the selection must receive approval by the Legislative Council before a contract can be signed. The next meeting of the Legislative Council is February 20. Delays in these approvals have made our construction timeline extremely tight. However, at this point, we are still pushing to have construction completed by June 15, 2009. This will give us time to get the optical network installed and tested, then build the Layer 2 & 3 backbone infrastructure and the links to the campuses to hopefully have our campuses operational by the time the Fall 2009 semester starts.

Here are brief status updates on each of the fiber lateral projects:

a. Alma/MBO: The signed easements are awaiting approval by the UA System Office and Board of Trustees for approval. A proposal is being placed before the BoT that will enable easements to be expedited through UA System Office approval and just follow-up reporting to the BoT afterwards. McClelland Engineering and GA Engineering has issued draft prints for the fiber hut to be constructed, and these are under review by the ARE-ON staff. The fiber construction prints are also under review by ARE-ON staff.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: ARE-ON staff has reviewed the draft prints for the two routes to the campus, and CT&T is working on final drawings. We have a pending request to MBO and Cox for permission to use their splice points. We also have two pending requests for railroad permits. The UA legal counsel issued an opinion that the University is not subject to city franchises due to status as a state entity.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: CT&T has completed the draft prints for the two routes to the ATU campus. Both sets are currently under review by the ARE-ON staff. Of note is McLeod/Paetec reversing an earlier decision to now allow ARE-ON to build to the mid-span splice point along I-40 nearest the campus on the south route. This saves ARE-ON substantial cost in not having to extend that fiber several miles to the next available splice point east of Weir Road.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: Conway Corp has agreed to build a portion of the northern route to the UCA campus. We will have to build a short amount of fiber to connect to the McLeod splice point near the intersection of I-40 and Skyline Drive and at the other end of the cable to connect to the campus. The agreement with Conway Corp is currently under review by our legal counsel. CT&T has been directed to engineer the southern route to connect the campus to the McLeod splice point along I-40 south of Dave Ward Drive.

e. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: We have decided to not build the two routes from the McLeod fiber along I-40 into the Level3 POP.

f. North Little Rock/McLeod POP: CT&T is working on the draft prints for this route, which replaces the two routes we had originally planned for joining the McLeod and Level3 long-haul fibers at the Level3 POP. It is a single short build along state highway right-of-way with a short segment that McLeod will provide into their splice point at the intersection of I-40 and I-440. We have decided that the McLeod POP will house our Juniper core router and an ADVA ROADM. We anticipate needing a single easement to cross private property to reach the McLeod POP, but the easement research is still pending.

g. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: CT&T is working on the draft prints for the northern route into the UAPB campus. An agreement with WEHCO Video for a separate southern route is still pending.

h. Monticello/UA Monticello: ARE-ON staff has reviewed the draft prints for both the northern and southern routes to the UAM campus and returned them to CT&T for revisions and finalization.

i. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: CT&T will issue draft prints of the northern route next week for ARE-ON’s review. We have decided to get a formal proposal from Suddenlink for the southern route. Suddenlink’s fiber will be predominantly aerial, but will be substantially less expensive than if we were to building it ourselves. Level3 has given us preliminary estimates for the cost of building off their splice point near the intersection of I-30 and Country Club Road.

j. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: We have decided to get a formal proposal from Suddenlink to build fiber from the Level3 POP near Guernsey and the SAU campus in Magnolia. We do not think that we can put together an eastern route to Monticello in a short timeframe or that would cost us less than what Suddenlink has proposed. Our desire to find a lower-cost route to the east out of Magnolia using fiber from multiple providers does not look promising at this point.

k. Little Rock/UALR/UAMS: Our understanding is that the Time Warner Telecom agreement with the City of Little Rock is very near resolution. We have an alternative plan in place that will require construction of our own fiber to UALR and UAMS, but at significant cost. We are anxious to get this deal completed so that we can start the route design work needed to tie the two campuses into the rest of the backbone fiber.

l. Monroe/University of Louisiana – We are awaiting the MOU with LONI before we can proceed with this project.

9. Arkansas One-Call & ARKUPS: The application for ARKUPS (the non-profit organization that will contract with us to do utility locates) has not yet come in. When we receive it, we will file it along with the application for Arkansas One-Call.

10. Commodity Internet: We have received clearance to put out a RFI for commodity Internet service, which we plan to do in the month of January. Germane to the discussion are not just bandwidth costs, but also the cost of local loops, backhaul, and possible colocation. The Quilt providers all offer very promising rates and free backhaul with certain restrictions. However, our understanding is that the market has grown increasingly competitive, thereby offering us other choices beyond just the Quilt providers. A RFI will help us get the information to know how to proceed with contracting for Commodity Internet services for our members.

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

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

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

Status Report - 8 December 2008

2008-12-08T00:17:00.001-06:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for December 8, 2008:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: We are still awaiting the final decision by State Procurement on the protest filed by ePlus and Cisco.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We will be wrapping up the IRU for the Little Rock to Monroe route with McLeod/Paetec this week. We will be making adjustments in the collocation sites to make the North Little Rock POP the major Little Rock metro area fiber crossroads rather than the Level3 POP.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: We have begun to pursue an alternative plan to using the TWTC metro fiber in Little Rock. This includes fiber builds off the Level3 fiber that passes through Little Rock to the UALR and UAMS campuses.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Ritter has begun construction of fiber in the Jonesboro area to the ASU campus, but that build was put on hold pending completion of easements and rights of way across the ASU campus.

5. Suddenlink: The proposal for the two Suddenlink routes in Russellville and Arkadelphia are still on the table as alternatives to doing our own construction.

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: Steven Karp reports that Juniper found and fixed one of the two problems he filed with JTAC regarding broken policy when non-stop routing (NSR) is enabled. The fix is due in release 9.3R2 in the third week of December. The second problem regarding routing engine (RE) failover issues has not been reproducible. Steven has instructions from JTAC on additional logging and what information to capture if we have to do an emergency reboot due to RE problems.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: The approval of our selection of the construction manager is still pending at the UA System Office.

With the denial of permits by the AHTD to construct fiber on controlled access highways (interstates), we have pursued alternatives through our long-haul fiber providers, McLeod and Level3. CT&T has secured an agreement with McLeod in which McLeod will do the permitting, but our construction crews will build the fiber. We have one unresolved issue about ownership and maintenance of the fiber that we hope to resolve this week. For fiber along Level3 routes, Level3 policy is more restrictive. They will build fiber from their splice points to a new handhold just off the interstate right-of-way where we will meet them with our fiber. Scott Ramoly met with Level3 and CT&T last Thursday in Little Rock and Arkadelphia to review each project. We are awaiting a pricing proposal from Level3.

Here are brief status updates on each of the fiber lateral projects:

a. Alma/MBO: The signed easements are awaiting approval by the UA System Office and Board of Trustees for approval. We are seeking blanket approval for future easements to speed the process as we work our way through other cities. Also, Steven Karp produced a 3D SketchUp drawing of our ideas for the fiber hut that will be built at this location, which McClelland is using the produce the final engineering plans for its construction.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: CT&T is working to complete the route survey and diagrams for the two routes in Fort Smith to the UAFS campus. There is a pending question about the need for a city franchise agreement.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: The northern route to the ATU campus is completed, and CT&T has preliminary route diagrams ready. McLeod will obtain permits from the AHTD for the eastern route, and CT&T is engineering the longitudinal route along I-40 to the point at which we will divert across ATU property to reach the ATU demarc. There are no easements other than that of ATU required for this route as long as we can build longitudinally along the highway.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: We are still awaiting the proposal from Conway Corp on the northern route to the UCA campus. CT&T is engineering the short build from the McLeod splice point to a pole where we will meet Conway Corp’s fiber. CT&T is still working on the southern route to the campus. The splice point that Scott and I found along Dave Ward Drive is not viable, so we will use the original splice point. Brent Herring of UCA wrote last week to say that there is no available conduit from a point near where the Conway Corp fiber terminates near the UCA campus, but that a need exists to build new conduit that we could share the costs on.

e. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: We will almost certainly not be building these two routes, instead favoring a much shorter build at the McLeod POP at the intersection of I-40 and I-440.

f. North Little Rock/McLeod POP: CT&T is working on measurements and drawings for this route, which replaces the two routes we had originally planned for joining the McLeod and Level3 long-haul fibers at the Level3 POP.

g. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: Preliminary route selection is complete. We are still waiting on a proposal from WEHCO Video on the alternative for the southern route to the UAPB campus. CT&T will work with McLeod on the short build along I-530.

h. Monticello/UA Monticello: CT&T has completed measurements and drafting for both routes to the UAM campus. It is ready for construction as soon as the construction manager contract is completed.

i. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: CT&T has completed the route diagrams for the north route to the HSU campus, and has completed the measurements for the south route. Since Suddenlink’s alternative for the south route will likely be less expensive, we placed further work by CT&T on this route until we have a chance to review the Suddenlink proposal. Scott visited the site along I-30 with Level3 and CT&T last Thursday. Level3 is preparing a proposal for building fiber for us from their splice point to a location just off the interstate right-of-way.

j. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: CT&T arranged a meeting with Community Cable last week during which CC agreed in principle to provide fiber from Monticello to Warren, plus additional fiber from Warren to Fordyce and East Camden. The latter route might be useful if we are unable to get a similar agreement from South Arkansas Telephone Company. Mike Abbiatti had a conversation with the president of SATCO and we were encouraged to hear that SATCO may be receptive, at least to further discussions to develop a proposal. I am less confident that we will find a low-cost route from Monticello to Magnolia, but having these discussions now is important as we look to the possible closing of the southern fiber ring.

k. Little Rock/UALR/UAMS: Working under the assumption that the TWTC fiber in the Little Rock metro area will not be available for our use, we are having CT&T develop plans for fiber builds off our Level3 fiber to the UALR and UAMS campuses. Scott met with Level3 last Thursday about these builds, and Level3 will provide a proposal for building short spans off their fiber to meet-me points where CT&T will engineer the remainder portion of the routes to the campuses.

l. Monroe/University of Louisiana – We are awaiting the MOU with LONI before we can proceed with this project.

9. Arkansas One-Call & ARKUPS: The application for ARKUPS (the non-profit organization that will contract with us to do utility locates) has not yet come in. When we receive it, we will file it along with the application for Arkansas One-Call.

10. Commodity Internet: We have had several conversations with Level3 and Qwest about commodity Internet service. We are working with them to identify the most cost-effective connecting point. Both of these providers, along with others on the Quilt contract, provide free backhaul as long as we have a certain minimum bandwidth commitment.

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

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

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

Status Report - November 24, 2008

2008-11-25T17:42:00.000-06:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for November 24, 2008:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: The meeting with State Procurement to hear ePlus and Cisco present their concerns expressed by the protest filed in the award of the DWDM equipment was held on Monday, November 17. A follow-on conference call took place on November 19. We anticipate the decision by State Procurement to be announced this week.

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 have had no further updates from the Little Rock city attorney on the TWTC agreement. I believe it is time to move on to other options since there seems to be no hope of any timely completion of the agreement.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams called me late on Friday to give an update on Ritter’s progress. Ritter has completed the construction for their portion of the project from Harrisburg to Vanndale (just north of Wynne) and are now working with Arkansas State University-Jonesboro to complete the build-out to the campus demarc. WEHCO is making progress on building between Wynne and Vanndale, with completion expected in mid-December. David did not have up-to-date information on the WEHCO project to build from Forrest City to the Level3 and McLeod POPs in Widener.

5. Suddenlink: The proposal for the two Suddenlink routes in Russellville and Arkadelphia are still on the table as alternatives to doing our own construction.

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: Steven Karp continues to work with Juniper on resolution of two problems that have been plagued us for nearly a month. After the outage we took on Sunday, November 16, Steven requested a conference call with Juniper management that took place on Monday, November 17, during which time expressed frustration with the level of communication by Juniper TAC. Juniper promised better communication and gave us insight on the progress that they have made with the problems. They also helped us understand better how to approach the JTAC duty manager when we need status information or have a need to escalate a problem.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: The approval of our selection of the construction manager is still pending at the UA System Office. Dr. B. Alan Sugg will take it to the ARE-ON board for their approval before we can award the contract.

Since we have been unable to get the permits that we need from the AHTD to do construction along controlled access highways (interstate highways), we have approached McLeod and Level3 for their assistance in completing these builds. I contacted Level3 and have begun the process of getting them to build from their splice points to a demarcation point where we can meet them with our fiber. Scott Ramoly will be doing site visits with a Level3 engineer on December 3 from which Level3 will create a scope of work and estimate of cost. CT&T will be accompanying them. McLeod is proving to be a bit more flexible. CT&T contacted them and they have agreed to front the permitting with the AHTD for us, but work through CT&T on the engineering and construction.

Here are brief status updates on each of the fiber lateral projects:

a. Alma/MBO: The signed easements have been forwarded to James Ezell at UAF, who is taking them to the UA System Office and Board of Trustees for approval. He is seeking a blanket approval for these easements since we will have a number of them. The UA System Office legal counsel made a slight change in the DBA name under which ARE-ON is operating for the purpose of these easements.

In our weekly status meeting with McClelland, we went over preliminary designs for the fiber hut that we must construct near Alma. Steven produced a 3D representation of his ideas using Sketchup. McClelland send Steven their current draft of the Autocad drawings, which he was able to import into Sketchup McClelland will incorporate our ideas in their next draft.

CT&T will be working with McLeod on the engineering of the short build on I-40.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: I met Cox Communications and MBO in Fort Smith on November 17 to verify that a proposed splice point near the Garrison Avenue bridge was viable for our use. Now finally having two connecting points to our existing MBO fiber, CT&T can complete the measurements so that we can have this ready for construction whenever the construction manager contract is completed.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: The northern route to the ATU campus is completed, and CT&T should have drawings ready within a week. CT&T will work with McLeod on the build necessary along I-40, plus they can now complete the measurements for the eastern route to the campus. I am uncertain at this point whether it will be necessary to get more private easements to complete this route.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: We are still awaiting the proposal from Conway Corp on the northern route to the UCA campus. CT&T will work with McLeod on the short build needed along I-40 to a pole where we will meet Conway Corp’s fiber. CT&T has begun developing the southern route to the campus. Scott and I found a new splice point on the McLeod fiber that is closer than the original one that we identified. If this proves to be a viable splice point for our use, we will not need to build along I-40 controlled access right-of-way.

e. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: Preliminary route selection is complete. We are considering eliminate these builds in favor of a much shorter fiber build at the North Little Rock McLeod POP.

f. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: Preliminary route selection is complete. We are still waiting on a proposal from WEHCO Video on the alternative for the southern route to the UAPB campus. CT&T will work with McLeod on the short build along I-530.

g. Monticello/UA Monticello: CT&T has completed measurements and drafting for both routes to the UAM campus. It is ready for construction as soon as the construction manager contract is completed.

h. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: CT&T has completed the route diagrams for the north route to the HSU campus, and has completed the measurements for the south route. Since Suddenlink’s alternative for the south route will likely be less expensive, we placed further work by CT&T on this route until we have a chance to review the Suddenlink proposal. The north route requires a lateral crossing of I-30, which should pose no permitting problems from the AHTD. The southern route, if we choose to build it, will require some construction by Level3 due to AHTD restrictions on permitting. We are working with Level3 on a possible proposal for this build. The Suddenlink proposal has the advantage of not requiring us to obtain the AHTD permit.

i. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: CT&T arranged two meetings with Community Cable and South Arkansas Telephone Company on December 2 in Little Rock. Unfortunately, South Arkansas Telephone Company has asked for a postponement, which may indicate some reluctance in working with us. We are going ahead with the Community Cable meeting and will try to reschedule the meeting with SATCO. These meetings could provide extremely important in our efforts to get fiber between Monticello and Magnolia.

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. Given the uncertainty of the TWTC fiber, I think we are close to making the decision about building this route.

k. Monroe/University of Louisiana – We are awaiting the MOU with LONI before we can proceed with this project.

9. Arkansas One-Call & ARKUPS: The application for ARKUPS (the non-profit organization that will contract with us to do utility locates) has not yet come in. When we receive it, we will file it along with the application for Arkansas One-Call.

10. Commodity Internet: As a part of our discussions with Level3 about fiber construction along the interstate highways, we opened dialogue on the possibility of obtaining Level3 commodity Internet service. Level3 identified on-net locations in Nashville, Memphis, and Dallas where we can obtain free backhaul. Nashville is out of the question, but Memphis and Dallas could both be made possible by lighting the paths to those cities. Level3 is checking into what they can provide in Little Rock. They offer service through the metro fiber network (formerly Telcove), but the cost may be higher and is not covered by the Quilt contract. We will continue to pursue this with them.

We continue to receive information from Qwest about their commodity Internet and other services. Qwest is checking into handoff of services to locations where we have fiber terminations in Dallas and Tulsa. We are looking for any location where we can avoid having to pay local loop or backhaul costs to reach a Qwest POP.

Late note: A letter from Richard Weiss, Director of the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, went out to all state agencies, boards and commissions, and institutions of higher education in which he informed all that all of these agencies are required to use the state core network operated by DIS for commodity Internet. Our legal counsel is reviewing this document. At face value, it could pose a problem to our intent to offer commodity Internet services to our members.

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

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

13. Training: Scott Ramoly attended a class on outside plant cabling in Albuquerque November 17-21. This class will be key to the construction of our fiber hut in Alma and will also be useful for producing the detailed site preparation documents that we will append to the collocation agreements with our member campuses.

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

Status Report - November 17, 2008

2008-11-16T22:00:00.002-06:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for November 17, 2008:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: The hearing for the protest filed in the award of the DWDM equipment is scheduled for 10:00am on Monday, November 17.

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 have had no further updates from the Little Rock city attorney on the TWTC agreement. Scott Ramoly, Steven Karp, and I have been discussing an update to our network design in the event that the TWTC fiber decision is substantially delayed or falls through.

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 and have a draft ready to go back to him this week.

5. Suddenlink: Suddenlink has provided us with estimates on two routes, one from the eastern splice point in Russellville to the ATU campus, and one along the southern route in Arkadelphia to the HSU campus. Both are significantly less expensive than the cost of building our own fiber, but have the disadvantage of being almost entirely aerial and being limited to just four strands of fiber.

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: Steven Karp has continued to work with Juniper TAC on a problem with BGP that appears to be related to a non-stop routing bug that he uncovered on the MX960. This came to a head this Sunday morning, November 16, when OneNet maintenance triggered a problem with the router we peer with, which in turn triggered the same BGP problem we have had between the MX960 and one of our lab routers. Steven came in and rebooted the MX960. We had about two hours of unplanned downtime on Sunday morning. Steven thinks that all of the problems he has seen over the past 3-4 weeks have been related to the non-stop routing problem.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: The evaluation committee met with the candidates for the construction manager job on Friday, November 14. Four companies were interviewed and a recommendation was made to Dr. Don Pederson. He will be writing a letter to Dr. B. Alan Sugg for approval by the ARE-ON board. The selection is based on qualifications, and if the selection is approved, the university will negotiate the cost for the company’s services. The construction manager will serve as general contractor for the fiber laterals construction, be responsible for bidding the individual construction projects to qualified subcontractors, and supervise the construction to ensure that it is done per the design specifications for each route. We have several sites just about ready for construction, all of which will be placed in the first phase bid package.

Scott Ramoly and I had a meeting with the AHTD on Wednesday, November 12, in their offices in Little Rock. AHTD has continued to hold to their policy that they will only grant right-of-way permits on controlled access highways (interstate highways) to telecommunications utilities. We will contact Level3 and McLeod about building the portions of the routes we need along the interstates, but we will also contact some of the other carriers we have done business with about the same. This setback will likely cause delays and cost us significantly more money, neither of which we can really afford. Until we have the permits for these portions of our routes, CT&T cannot complete the route design for a number of locations, including Alma, Russellville, Conway, North Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and Arkadelphia.

Here are brief status updates on each of the fiber lateral projects:

a. Alma/MBO: CT&T has obtained signed easements for the fiber build and fiber hut construction. Last Friday a question arose about whose name for ARE-ON should appear on the easements. We are trying to get this clarified. This question, plus the resolution of the AHTD permit for the short build along I-40, are the two holdups on this project. This build needs to be in the first bid package for construction.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: I have a meeting in Fort Smith on Monday afternoon, November 17, with Cox Communications and MBO to verify and get permission to use a Cox splice point near the Garrison Avenue bridge in Fort Smith. Once we have the permission, CT&T can complete the design for the southern route to the UAFS campus. The two routes in Fort Smith will be in the first bid package for construction.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: The northern route to the ATU campus is completed, and CT&T should have drawings ready within a week. We are awaiting final approval from the ATHD for right-of-way along I-40 for the eastern route to the campus before CT&T can complete their design. Suddenlink’s estimate for the eastern route is lower in cost than building it ourselves and presents an attractive alternative.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: Scott Ramoly and I had a meeting with Conway Corp on Monday, November 10, during which they provided us with a description of the north route that they would be willing to provide for us to the UCA campus. We will have to build a short piece of that route, a portion of which requires a permit for access to I-40. We should receive the proposal, including cost, sometime this week. Conway Corp cannot provide fiber for our southern route to the campus, and we have asked CT&T to start working on that route.

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. While waiting we have considered an alternative to these two fiber builds that may lower our costs and accommodate a substantial delay in the availability of the TWTC fiber.

f. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: Preliminary route selection is complete. Scott Ramoly and I had a meeting with WEHCO Video in Little Rock on Tuesday, November 11, during which we pitched the idea of using their fiber for one of the routes to the UAPB campus. WEHCO is very interested and is working on a proposal and pricing for us. We feel that WEHCO can significantly lower our costs in Pine Bluff.

g. Monticello/UA Monticello: CT&T has completed both routes to the UAM campus and should have the route drawings completed within a week.

h. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: CT&T has completed the route diagrams for the north route to the HSU campus, and has completed the measurements for the south route. Since Suddenlink’s alternative for the south route will likely be less expensive, we placed further work by CT&T on this route until we have a chance to review the Suddenlink proposal. The north route requires a lateral crossing of I-30, which should pose no permitting problems from the AHTD, but the south route will require a permit from AHTD for a short portion along I-30. The Suddenlink proposal has the advantage of not requiring us to obtain the AHTD permit.

i. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: CT&T has arranged two meetings with Community Cable and South Arkansas Telephone Company on December 2 in Little Rock. We will propose a cooperative arrangement to use their fiber, potentially with some additional construction, to link Monticello to El Dorado. From El Dorado, we hope to use Suddenlink fiber to reach Magnolia. This will solve our major outstanding dilemma with reaching SAU with dark fiber if these companies are receptive to our proposal.

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 – We are awaiting the MOU with LONI before we can proceed with this project.

9. Arkansas On-Call & ARKUPS: Scott Ramoly and I dropped by the Arkansas One-Call offices in Conway on our way back from Little Rock on November 12. We picked up an application for AOC and had a very nice conversation with their CEO and Operations Manager. AOC’s sister company is ARKUPS who provides locate services for utilities. Membership in Arkansas One-Call is an absolute requirement for ARE-ON, and having a contract with ARKUPS for utility locate service will pretty much be a necessity.

10. Qwest Commodity Internet: We began discussions with Qwest via a conference call on November 11 on the use of their commodity Internet service through the Quilt. Qwest is preparing a list of on-net connecting points in our region so that we can evaluate where we might need to place equipment. Qwest does not have IPv6 dual-stack support in production yet, which we feel will be important for any CIS provider we contract with, but they plan to roll it out in early 2009. We also talked with Qwest about direct peering through OneNet via a VLAN, and this is still under investigation.

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

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

13. Campus Visits: Mike Abbiatti and Steven Karp traveled to Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, LA, on November 11-13 to meet with representatives from Arkansas Tech University. This was the second in the series of meetings designed to match ARE-ON universities with similar universities in Louisiana to trade ideas about applications and network use.

14. Training: Scott Ramoly will be attending a class on outside plant cabling in Albuquerque November 17-21. This class will be key to the construction of our fiber hut in Alma and will also be useful for producing the detailed site preparation documents that we will append to the collocation agreements with our member campuses.

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

Status Report - November 10, 2008

2008-11-09T21:04:00.002-06:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for November 10, 2008:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: A protest was filed in the award of the DWDM equipment RFP. The November 12 hearing scheduled with State Procurement was postponed to November 17.

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 have had no further updates from the Little Rock city attorney on the TWTC agreement. He had planned a conference call with TWTC on October 30, but we have no word on the outcome of the call. The major outstanding issue was usage restrictions for our use of the TWTC metro fiber.

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 and have a draft ready to go back to him this week.

5. Suddenlink: We are awaiting a new estimate from Suddenlink for a fiber route in Arkadelphia that might displace our need to build the southern route to the HSU campus. Also, Suddenlink said they would provide an estimate for an alternative to our eastern route in Russellville to the ATU campus.

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: Steven Karp had originally planned to move the UAF Juniper M10 router from the Force10 router to the Fayetteville Juniper MX960 on November 6, but he encountered a BGP problem while testing the configuration in our lab that caused a postponement. He and I have still not been able to identify the source of the problem. This makes the third major problem with the MX960 routers since their acquisition this summer.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: Of the five companies who responded to the newspaper advertisement for a construction manager, four have agreed to come to Fayetteville for the interviews scheduled to take place on November 14. The fifth company withdrew because they were more interested in the actual construction than construction management.

We have had several conversations with AHTD personnel regarding our request for use of right-of-way along controlled access highways. AHTD’s policy restricts these permits to utilities only, so we are continuing to work with them on a waiver of the policy. These permits are critical to our ability to build our lateral fibers to our member campuses. Until we reach resolution, CT&T will be unable to complete the survey and drafting work necessary to begin construction.

Here are brief status updates on each of the fiber lateral projects:

a. Alma/MBO: CT&T has obtained verbal agreement for all of the easements necessary for the fiber build and fiber hut construction. They are securing the signed easement documents and will immediately start the surveys. We have also passed information received from Madison County Telephone Company to McClelland for their architect to draft the plans for the construction hut. This will be a concrete block building on a poured slab with reinforced metal roof, designed hopefully to survive a tornado strike.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: We are working on our fifth or sixth redesign of the fiber route to UAFS as a result of the restriction AT&T placed on our use of their manholes and conduit into the MBO POP in downtown Fort Smith. Scott Ramoly and CT&T drove the possible routes for the Midland Blvd. bridge splice point, and none of them looked feasible or economical. As a result, we are now working on use of a Cox splice point under the Garrison Ave. bridge. The benefit of this route is that it uses much of the original south route that CT&T did for us weeks ago. The north route comes off a splice point on 6th Street between P and Division Streets and looks good. The city engineer claimed that we would need a city franchise agreement, but CT&T is almost certain that we will not since this is a state-funded project. They will be conferring with Fort Smith city officials to confirm.

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. Suddenlink will also be providing an estimate for an alternative to the east route.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: Conway Corp has indicated that they will be willing to work with us on builds and use of existing fiber and rights of way. We have a meeting scheduled with them on November 10 during which they should provide us with information on what they can and are willing to do.

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. We have a meeting scheduled for November 11 with WEHCO Cable on possible use of their fiber in Pine Bluff for one of our routes to the campus. The fiber builds in Pine Bluff are expensive and use of WEHCO fiber could bring that project’s cost down significantly.

g. Monticello/UA Monticello: CT&T has nearly completed the surveying and drafting of this route and should have it ready for construction very soon.

h. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: The preliminary route selection is complete. CT&T has nearly completed survey and drafting of the north route and is wrapping up the work on the south route. The south route requires a short stretch of access along I-30, which is waiting for the AHTD permit along controlled access highway. Suddenlink will also be submitting an estimate for an alternative to the south route using some of their existing fiber that may be less expensive.

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 will probably take place the first week in December.

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 – We are awaiting the MOU with LONI before we can proceed with this project.

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. OneNet: Mike Abbiatti, Bob Zimmerman, and I had a videoconference with OneNet on November 5 during which we discussed continued membership in the Great Plains Network. Current plans are for Bob Zimmerman to give the six-month advance notice of discontinuing membership in GPN. The real intent of this is to get GPN to clarify with us the membership requirements for Arkansas’s continued use of the OneNet link and direct peering with GPN and Internet2.

13. Campus Visits: Mike Abbiatti and Steven Karp will be traveling to Northwestern State University with Arkansas Tech University in the second of the campus visits that Mike is planning. The intent is to match ARE-ON member campuses with similar campuses in other states having an established regional optical network where they can exchange information on applications.

14. Training: Scott Ramoly will be attending a class on him outside plant cabling in Albuquerque November 17-21. This class will be key to the construction of our fiber hut in Alma and will also be useful for producing the detailed site preparation documents that we will append to the collocation agreements with our member campuses.

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

Status Report - 3 November 2008

2008-11-03T02:25:00.000-06:00

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

Status Report - October 20, 2008

2008-10-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for October 20, 2008:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: Additional shipments of ADVA equipment have arrived and are stored in the Government Ave. warehouse. We have been advised to place all activities on hold pending a protest filed over the RFP award.

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: No new developments. We are still awaiting TWTC’s review of the current draft of the agreement with the City of Little Rock.

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. I did not hear from Suddenlink this past week. We are anticipating two proposals from them, one for a fiber route from Jonesboro to Biscoe, and another for the lateral builds from our McLeod splice points in Russellville to the Arkansas Tech University campus.

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

7. Juniper Routers: The Fayetteville Juniper MX960 core router is now in production as of October 17. Steven Karp worked with OneNet to install a second, temporary 10Gig link using an extra wavelength between Fayetteville and Tulsa to connect our new Juniper MX960 to OneNet’s router at OSU Tulsa. He is still debugging a BGP localpref issue, so we have left the temporary 10Gig link operational throughout the weekend until he and OneNet can do some additional diagnostics.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: In the Friday, October 17, weekly status meeting with Facilities Management, McClelland Consultant Engineers, and CT&T, we got an update site-by-site on progress by CT&T. This will be summarized below. We also learned that Bob Beeler of FACM was able to get approval to use the construction coordinator (CM) method of selecting construction firms. A newspaper advertisement went out this weekend asking for companies to respond to a Request for Qualifications, which is due October 31. The CM will be selected through an interview process similar to that of the engineering company. The CM we select will then work directly with McClelland at CT&T on construction route details and will bid each construction project/phase. Phase I bids could be ready for construction bid in 4 to 5 weeks, pending permissions for right-of-way along the controlled access highways.

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: AT&T has denied access into their manhole and conduit that would permit easy splice access into the MBO POP in downtown Fort Smith and facilitated the southern route into the UAFS campus. We have identified alternative splice points north of the POP that will require a redesign of the routes. Scott Ramoly has a meeting scheduled with MBO and Cox on Wednesday to verify the splice points, followed by a meeting with CT&T to redesign the 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 have a meeting scheduled on October 20 with Conway Corp about them potentially building the two routes to the UCA campus for us.

e. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: Preliminary route selection is complete.

f. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: Preliminary route selection is complete. However, CT&T is facilitating a meeting with WEHCO Cable to potentially use some of their fiber for one of the routes. This could save money, plus give us a partner in town for future projects.

g. Monticello/UA Monticello: Preliminary route selection is complete. CT&T will start route measurements this week.

h. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: The preliminary route selection is complete. CT&T has begun route measurements.

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: Scott Ramoly met with CT&T last week to develop a preliminary route between two Level3 splice points in Little Rock through the UALR and UAMS campuses. They were not able to locate the northern splice point that is closest to the UAMS campus, but have proceeded based on the assumption that the Level3 map is accurate and that the splice point might be buried. Portions of this route are very difficult. CT&T will have a preliminary estimate ready by October 24.

k. Monroe/University of Louisiana – Monroe: I met with Lonnie Leger of LONI while at the Internet2 meeting last week to discuss the fiber lateral into the ULM campus where we will place an ARE-ON routing node and connection to the LONI network. LONI has fiber in the McLeod manhole where our fiber passes through, and 24-count fiber from there to the ULM campus. LONI is willing to provide a fiber pair into the ULM campus. After the interstate MOU is signed, we can simply contract with LONI to do the necessary splicing and collocation at the ULM campus.

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

10. DIS Peering: We will work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router after we have it in production.

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 will be traveling 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.

13. Madison County Telephone: Steven Karp has arranged for a friendly meeting in Huntsville on Thursday with Madison County Telephone to tour one of their fiber huts. MCT builds their own huts rather than use preconstructed concrete huts.

14. Training: Scott Ramoly is scheduled to attend ADVA training in Norcross, GA, the week of October 27-31. 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

Status Report - October 13, 2008

2008-10-12T23:41:00.000-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for October 13, 2008:

1. ADVA DWDM equipment: A second shipment of ADVA DWDM equipment is scheduled for today via UPS. Scott Ramoly will handle unloading at the Government Ave. warehouse.

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. In a meeting with UALR and UAMS following the steering committee meeting last week, we were asked to develop an alternate to the TWTC fiber in the event the agreement is either delayed or fails.

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: I did not hear from Suddenlink this past week. We are anticipating two proposals from them, one for a fiber route from Jonesboro to Biscoe, and another for the lateral builds from our McLeod splice points in Russellville to the Arkansas Tech University campus.

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

7. Juniper Routers: Steven Karp worked with OneNet to install a second, temporary 10Gig link using an extra wavelength between Fayetteville and Tulsa to connect our new Juniper MX960 to OneNet’s router at OSU Tulsa. We plan to make the cutover to the MX960 as our production core router, replacing the Force10 E600i, on the morning of October 17. This migration should be non-disruptive. Traffic will be moved to the temporary circuit while we replumb the current protected production circuit over to the MX960.

8. Fiber Laterals Engineering: We initiated a weekly status meeting with Facilities Management, McClelland Consulting Engineers, and CT&T on Friday, October 10. This was a very productive meeting. MCE delivered the contract to FACM, something we had hoped to have about a month ago. Not having it hasn’t slowed us up much since CT&T has been working with us without a contract. Another topic of discussion was the decision whether we can use the alternate delivery method of selecting a construction manager or whether each construction project will have to go through the normal bidding process. Bob Beeler of Facilities Management pledged to have the decision early next week in time to meet the Wednesday deadline for placing the newspaper ads soliciting responses for qualifications for construction managers. We also grouped the lateral construction projects into multiple phases, with the Alma, Russellville, and Fort Smith builds grouped as Phase I. We also spent some time discussing the Little Rock UALR/UAMS alternate route project. CT&T will meet Scott in Little Rock to develop the route so that a budgetary estimate can be prepared. We are asking that this estimate be ready within two weeks.

a. Alma/MBO: We received permission from Cox to use the splice point on the route along Hwy 64 just west of Alma. Scott Ramoly has instructed CT&T to begin the detailed route planning and right-of-way acquisition where we can build the fiber to the nearby McLeod splice point and to build a hut where we can install DWDM equipment. We will need right-of-way on the controlled access I-40, which will take special permission from the Arkansas Highway Department.

b. Fort Smith/UA Fort Smith: We are working on details of splicing into the MBO fiber to reach the UAFS campus. The routes are nearly complete. Key to the completion are two issues, including permission to splice into the Cox fiber north of the MBO POP, and access into AT&T conduit into the downtown area. Our plans include converting the ADVA amp site at the MBO POP into an OADM and relocating the equipment to the UAFS campus. This places UAFS on the backbone, plus eliminates the need for a ROADM at the MBO POP.

c. Russellville/Arkansas Tech University: CT&T identified a splice point near the I-40/Hwy 7 interchange that shortens the north route by nearly 1.5 miles, including a bridge crossing. McLeod has given us permission to use the splice point. There is a slack loop very near the campus that would shorten the south route by another 1.4 miles. McLeod has not given us permission to splice into this slack loop yet, but CT&T is advocating on our behalf.

d. Conway/University of Central Arkansas: We have a meeting scheduled on October 20 with Conway Corp about them potentially building the two routes to the UCA campus for us.

e. North Little Rock/Level3 POP: Preliminary route selection is complete.

f. Pine Bluff/UA Pine Bluff: Preliminary route selection is complete. However, CT&T is facilitating a meeting with WEHCO Cable to potentially use some of their fiber for one of the routes. This could save money, plus give us a partner in town for future projects.

g. Monticello/UA Monticello: Preliminary route selection is complete. CT&T identified a slack loop near the campus that eliminates near 3.5 miles on one route. McLeod has given permission to splice at that point, but has not given permission to use another splice point near the intersection of US425 and Jordan Road, which would eliminate nearly 1.2 miles off the other route.

h. Arkadelphia/Henderson State University: The preliminary route selection is complete. The north route will be much easier to construct than the south route.

i. Magnolia/Southern Arkansas University: We are pursuing the possibility of using fiber from multiple companies to span the distance between Magnolia and Monticello. CT&T is facilitating a discussion with these companies. If we can also identify a route from Magnolia to Hope or Texarkana, this would complete a ring for the southern part of the state, thus giving us the ability to build protected circuits for the ARE-ON members located in the southern half of the state.

j. Little Rock/UALR/UAMS: We are developing a possible alternative to the TWTC metro fiber that includes building fiber from a Level3 splice point near I-630 to the UAMS campus, then to the UALR campus, then to another Level3 splice point in south Little Rock. We started this project last Friday.

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

10. DIS Peering: We will work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router after we have it in production.

11. Workshop: The BGP and routing workshop for the ARE-ON members took place on October 8th at the Cisco offices in Little Rock. Seventeen of the 21 registered people were able to attend. I started the workshop with three hours of training on routing and the BGP protocol. Following lunch provided by Cisco, Steven Karp led the participants through three hands-on labs using Cisco routers provided by Cisco, as well as two of our Juniper EX4200 switches that we brought from Fayetteville. Comments from the attendees were positive.

12. SAU Magnolia DNS: Steven Karp and I have consulted with SAU Magnolia on setting up their own public-facing primary DNS server on campus rather than relying on their commodity Internet provider.

13. ARE-ON Steering Committee: We all attended the steering committee meeting at the UA System Office in Little Rock on October 7. Mike Abbiatti introduced all of the people on the ARE-ON team. I gave a presentation on the status of the network construction.

14. UAMS Rural Hospitals: We had a videoconference with UAMS on October 10 to discuss their requirements for interfacing rural hospitals, clinics, and AHECs all over the state into the ARE-ON network.

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

Status Report - October 6, 2008

2008-10-06T21:12:00.002-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for October 6, 2008:

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

Status Report - September 29, 2008

2008-09-29T04:00:00.003-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 29, 2008:

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

Status Report - September 22, 2008

2008-09-22T00:57:00.002-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 22, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee met by conference call on September 16 to do the scoring of the three finalists’ Best and Final Offer. The scores were averaged and added to the calculated score for Cost, producing final scores for all three vendors. The top ranked proposal was from ADVA Optical Networking. I wrote a letter of recommendation to the Purchasing Office on Friday with the results.

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: The TWTC lawyer wrote on September 19 to say that the review of the latest draft of the agreement had begun. Jeannie Winston from UALR has asked for a face-to-face meeting with TWTC following their review so that we can explain our position and rationale for this draft. TWTC is unavailable for travel this week, so it will be at least another week before this meeting can take place. It is still at this writing unscheduled.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent me a brief status report on September 19 along with the preliminary draft of our IRU agreement. Ritter has continued to work with WEHCO Video on the engineering of the fiber build in the Forrest City area.

5. Suddenlink: There are no new developments with Suddenlink.

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

7. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly has a meeting scheduled with MBO and Cox Communications on Tuesday in the Van Buren / Alma area to determine where the MBO fiber crosses I-40 and to look for a suitable splice location where we can splice the MBO fiber to the McLeod fiber. They will also visit the MBO POP in downtown Fort Smith to see the building entrances and take some measurements in preparation of building the fiber to UA Fort Smith.

8. Juniper Routers: The 10G linecards for the Juniper MX routers arrived on September 15. All of our linecards have been slotted into their respective routers and “smoke tested”. The serial numbers of all routers and cards have been forwarded to Juniper so that our maintenance contract can be completed. Juniper engineering and sales team spent most of September 18 with us talking about various issues and helping Steven configure the EX4200 switches in our building and the Harmon parking deck. As a result of their work, Steven came in late last Friday evening and completed the configuration of the switches, the new DHCP setup for our office machines, and the relocation of our Sun network management server to the new rack. Steven anticipates having the MX960 ready for production by September 30. During our discussions with Juniper we realized that it would be necessary for ARE-ON offices to have a border router. We decided to use the Force10 or the UA’s Juniper M10 when it becomes available, but it’s likely we will have to buy a small router. We asked Juniper to look into a router that had some security features such as a firewall or VPN blade.

Steven and I had a conversation with Von Royal of OneNet on September 19 about their assistance in migrating from the Force10 to the new Juniper MX960. We will temporarily use an existing, unused lambda between Fayetteville and Tulsa and a second 10G port on the OneNet Tulsa Cisco 6509 router to build and test the MX960 configuration.

9. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly met CT&T in Arkadelphia and Monticello to pick routes for Henderson State University and UA Monticello, respectively. They found one good route in Arkadelphia, but the second route presents a problem that will require additional investigation. They had better luck in Monticello where they identified two mid-span splice points much closer to the campus that will dramatically shorten our fiber builds. We are uncertain at this point whether McLeod will permit mid-span splices, but we will make our case in discussions that I will have with them this week.

10. ADSB Network: Steven has completed configuration of our Juniper EX4200 switches and is ready to migrate our offices to our new network. This will necessitate changing IP addresses for all our office computers, printers, and LifeSize units. We will make this changeover on 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 work with DIS on migrating their Fayetteville connection to the new MX960 router after we have it in production.

13. Workshops: Unfortunately, Cisco has not responded yet about availability of their lab and conference room in Little Rock for our routing workshop that we had hoped to conduct October 8th. Without their assistance it will be harder for us to do hands-on training using Cisco routers. At this point I think we have little choice but to push the date back.

14. Diane Didier’s Office: Steven and I cleaned out ADSB 228 for Diane’s arrival this week. I have a Dell E-series Latitude laptop and docking station on order for her, but it will not arrive in time. We will set up a temporary computer for her to use until her computer comes in.

15. Trouble Tickets: UA Fayetteville operations center called me on Sunday, September 17, regarding poor performance that local Cox cable modem customers were having with on-campus connections. Steven and I worked on the problem with the assistance of James Deaton of OneNet until late that evening. We identified the problem within Cox’s network, and James filed a trouble ticket with National TransitRail through which the Cox traffic was flowing. The following morning the problem was still not resolved, so OneNet made a temporary BGP route map change that favored the Internet2 commercial peering service route rather than NTR. OneNet reported on September 19 that Cox had identified the bad router and had rerouted traffic around it.

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

Status Report - September 15, 2008

2008-09-15T00:46:00.000-05:00

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

Status Report - September 8, 2008

2008-09-08T00:17:00.004-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for September 8, 2008:

This blog is now being published at http://nocblog.areon.net

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The formal Best and Final Offer request was submitted to the top three vendors using a format approved by the UAF purchasing office on September 3. We asked each vendor to alter their designs somewhat to conform to changes that have taken place in our network design since last March. The vendors’ proposals are due Tuesday, September 9, at 2:30 pm. A conference call during which the evaluation committee will make its final recommendation is to take place either on Thursday or Friday.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: I had a conference call with McLeod last Thursday, September 4, to answer questions leading up to the completion of the exhibits required for the new IRU. I will submit the final revision of the splice point and collocation request form on Monday, September 8. McLeod should have the agreement ready for signature by mid-week.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: A meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, September 9, in Little Rock with the City of Little Rock, UALR, UAMS, and ARE-ON staff and legal counsels to go over the latest draft of the agreement with TWTC. I will be attending the meeting. Bill Kincaid, UA legal counsel in Fayetteville, will participate by telephone. Melissa Rust from the UA System Office will also attend the meeting.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: David Adams from Ritter sent me a status report last Thursday on their progress. Ritter has a meeting planned with WEHCO Video on Friday, September 12, to review the overall requirements for our project, as well as additional needs that Ritter has. Ritter hopes to have a proposal back from WEHCO within a week. Ritter will work with us on the details on their agreement with WEHCO to ensure that it meets our needs as well as theirs. We should receive the first draft of our agreement with Ritter once the WEHCO agreement is settled.

Part of this project is some new fiber between Harrisburg and Wynne, plus the fiber that is to be built to our McLeod and Level3 fiber POPs near Forrest City. The fiber for the project is expected to arrive on October 6. Ritter is also working with the Highway Department and Entergy on easements and pole attachments, as well as ASU on the connection on the Jonesboro campus.

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

6. Van Buren/MBO: We are still waiting on final confirmation about the location of MBO fiber in the Van Buren area. Scott Ramoly has contacted Charlie Pickle from MBO several times, and he is awaiting feedback from Cox who manages the fiber. Scott will be visiting the location on Monday, September 8, with CT&T to do the preliminary engineering for the fiber build that will splice the MBO fiber to our McLeod fiber.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper MX routers were delivered on Thursday, September 4. We hauled the routers over to the Harmon parking deck on Friday and racked all but one of the MX960 routers (it will go into the same place as the Force10 E600i when we complete the migration to the new Fayetteville MX960, which is anticipated by the end of September). We will power up the routers either on Monday or Tuesday of this week and begin the process of configuring and testing them. Steven Karp captured time-lapse photos of the installation process and is assembling them into movies that we will post on Youtube. Here is Part 1 of the video showing the installation of the racks and the MX routers:

The line cards for the MX routers are the only components that we have not received. Juniper says that they were shipped from China and should be here by the end of this week.

Following our issue with Qwest’s internal order processing delays for our Juniper equipment, Qwest representatives will be in Fayetteville to meet with us on Tuesday, September 16. We also plan to use the meeting as an opportunity to discuss ARE-ON futures, especially as regards our members’ acquisition of additional Juniper routers and our eligibility for Quilt discounting.

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: Scott Ramoly will start touring cities with CT&T beginning Monday, September 8, as CT&T prepares the preliminary estimate for the cost of our fiber laterals to the university campuses. First up will be Russellville and Van Buren. CT&T advised us of a bridge renovation that will take place west of Russellville that will impact our build to one of the two Russellville splice points. We are also seeking advice from CT&T on filament counts and fiber type to use for our lateral builds. We will be purchasing our own stock to use for the actual construction.

9. ADSB Network: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly worked with Sean Bruce in UAF network services to install the patch cables in the various buildings in the fiber path between the Administrative Services Building and the Harmon Parking Deck. Some of the connections are temporary pending arrival of a new adapter for our new fiber scopes. Steven has one Juniper EX4200 racked up in our building, which he will configure and test this coming week. Once we have the link to the Harmon Parking Deck running, we will patch each of the Ethernet jacks in our offices into the EX4200, effectively removing our offices from the UAF campus network. This will enable us to do network management independently of the campus network. It will require all of our IP addresses to change, but that should not present a problem. The Wi-Fi connections will remain connected through the campus network, though.

10. 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.

11. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The changes in IP addresses for the LifeSize units will take place as soon as we can get the fiber link between our building and the Harmon parking deck completed. The units will then get their new, permanent IP addresses. We will ask the UAF folks to leave the systems in the DHCP tables so that we can move the units to another office or conference room in the building (thus necessitating connections through the campus network).

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 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. We have requested use of their facilities on either October 8th or 22nd. Since the ARE-ON steering committee meeting is tentatively planned for October 7th, I think it makes sense to push for the 8th. Cisco was in national sales meetings this past week, so we should hear from them this week on our request. Steven and I will team teach this workshop.

14. Document Reviews: I have reviewed the new ARE-ON member MOU and Management Council documents with Steven and Scott. We have a number of changes suggested for the MOU that will help clarify several IP address issues.

15. Quilt NOC Tools Videoconference Workshop: We have registered to participate in the Quilt NOC Tools Workshop on Wednesday, September 10. This is the first Quilt workshop conducted by videoconference, which will save a lot of money on travel, plus permit more people to participate. The installation of our LifeSize units is most timely! We have talked off and on about what software tools we want to deploy in the NOC to do various tasks from network monitoring, configuration management, trouble ticketing, etc. This workshop will help us better understand what tools are in use at other regional optical networks.

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

Status Report - September 1, 2008

2008-09-01T22:41:00.003-05:00

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

Status Report - August 25, 2008

2008-08-24T21:37:00.000-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 25, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee will meet on August 27 at the UA System Office in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. Our intent at the end of the day is to have the final recommendation from the evaluation committee for awarding the bid. The schedule for the meeting is:

08:30 – 10:00 Cisco
10:00 – 11:00 AT&T
11:00 – 12:00 ePlus Technology
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break
13:00 – 15:00 ADVA Optical Networking
15:00 – 17:00 Committee Final Evaluation

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We received an email from our McLeod/Paetec representative on Friday saying that they will have the IRU appendix ready early this coming week. They are currently reviewing our list of desired splice points along the Little Rock/Monroe route and the Memphis/Tulsa route. This, plus the requests for collocation, will be incorporated into the new appendix.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: The Little Rock city attorney is apparently still reviewing what he characterized as “a rather curious draft” of the agreement with Time Warner Telecom. He did not respond to my offer to meet with him while in Little Rock this past Wednesday. I am very concerned about the lack of progress.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I had a very good meeting in Jonesboro with Paul Waits and some of his staff from Ritter Communications last Tuesday. For several reasons, Ritter has returned to their original idea of extending their fiber from Wynne to the Forrest City area rather than tying into splice points in the West Memphis area. Ritter is pursuing a new opportunity to acquire fiber from a cable TV provider that has existing fiber between Wynne and Forrest City rather than having to build new fiber. Ritter will also have to replace some of their fiber between Harrisburg and Wynne since they are at capacity. Paul Waits felt that they would have this completed by the end of the calendar year. Ritter will build to both the Level3 and McLeod regen sites in Widener (near Forrest City) as a part of the deal.

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

6. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly and I went to Van Buren this past Friday to look at the feasibility of splicing our MBO fiber into our McLeod fiber. We were very encouraged to find the McLeod splice point, which is around 2000 feet from the MBO fiber. We found a good location for the fiber hut that will have to be built, but it’s on Arkansas highway department property. That will require some negotiation. MBO has expressed no interest or need for this fiber or hut, so we will add this build to the list for McClelland Engineering.

7. Juniper Routers: Steven Karp has been at a Juniper class all of the past week. We will begin installing the EX4200 switches this week. The larger MX switches are scheduled to ship this coming Friday, August 29. We will have a very busy week installing these routers when they arrive.

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: Immediately after our staff meeting on Monday morning I will be in contact with Facilities Management to press for the meeting with McClelland/CT&T that was to have taken place over a week ago to get the engineering fee and contract established. Scott Ramoly has completed the updates to the preliminary documents we will deliver to McClelland detailing the fiber laterals we need built.

9. NOC: Steven, Scott, and I will meet this week to draw up a preliminary list of services that we will need for 24x7x365 NOC support. We will base this on the document that the Indiana University Global NOC provided us. I will also contact the University’s purchasing division to get an understanding of what we will need to establish an outsourced contract. It’s highly likely that we will need to do an RFP.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The TV stands have arrived, and we have one of them assembled in Mike’s office. But we have not yet received the LifeSize units. I contacted the vendor, Comm3, and got a reply over the weekend that LifeSize had delayed shipment. We will get a shipping update on Monday from Comm3.

11. iPhones: Steven and Scott have received their iPhones, but I am still waiting on mine to be delivered.

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 have gotten the okay from Cisco to use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for the Routing and BGP Training workshop that we are planning for the ARE-ON member network engineering staff. We will have date nailed down this week. Tentatively, we are looking at the third or fourth week in September. Steven Karp and David Merrifield will be the instructors for the workshop.

14. State Technology Council: I attended a luncheon meeting of the State Technology Council on August 18 in Little Rock. Claire Bailey visualizes a state technology plan that echoes Gov. Beebe’s vision for the state, including educational advancement, economic development, protecting the future, and providing meaningful tax relief. There were discussions of technology procurement procedures and an enterprise architecture. Putting something like this together in such a way as to be usable across the spectrum of state agencies, public schools, and higher education institutions will be a real challenge. There is no hope to have this completed prior to the start of the legislative session. The opening meeting for the Council will probably take place in September at the UA Cooperative Extension Service campus in Little Rock with Gov. Beebe attending.

15. Monticello Meeting: Mike Abbiatti, Bill Ashmore, and I attended meetings at the University of Arkansas at Monticello this past Thursday. We had opportunities to meet with top UAM management, faculty, staff, and a few students to give them insight into what ARE-ON is, how their campus can benefit from ARE-ON, and to hear back from them about their needs. The UAM networking folks have made great strides in preparing their campus network for the ARE-ON connection. They have completed a new communications building that will serve as the ARE-ON demarc. Also completed and recently tested is a new campus fiber ring.

Written as the 2008 Beijing Olympics closing ceremony was in progress.

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

Status Report - August 18, 2008

2008-08-17T20:26:00.000-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 18, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment RFP: The evaluation committee is scheduled to meet on August 27 in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. Our intent at the end of the day is to have the final recommendation from the evaluation committee for awarding the bid. The schedule for the meeting is:

08:30 – 10:00 Cisco
10:00 – 11:00 AT&T
11:00 – 12:00 ePlus Technology
12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break
13:00 – 15:00 ADVA Optical Networking
15:00 – 17:00 Committee Final Evaluation

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We have been working with the McLeod/Paetec representatives on the appendix to the existing McLeod Dark Fiber Capacity Services Agreement that will add the Little Rock to Monroe fiber route. We will have the list of desired splice point locations and diagrams to McLeod on August 18, which should complete the list of exhibits necessary to complete the appendix.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: I got another update this weekend from the Little Rock city attorney on the status of this agreement. He had received another draft from Time Warner Telecom, but his team had yet to complete its review due to other city business. I offered to meet with him when I am in Little Rock this Wednesday.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Paul Waits of Ritter Communications in Jonesboro on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked him for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: A meeting with McLeod/Paetec, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, AT&T, OneNet, and an engineer from the City of Tulsa was held on August 6 to determine how to connect our McLeod fiber to the OneNet POP at the OSU Tulsa campus. The plan was to splice OneNet/INFO fiber in Manhole 1081 in front of the AT&T building to our McLeod fiber in a different manhole in front of the same AT&T building. This necessitated bringing both fibers into the building, but AT&T closed the door on that option when it said that its policy prohibited connecting private network inside their facilities. We have tabled this to pursue a better solution with MBO in the Van Buren area (see below).

6. Van Buren/MBO: We have identified a splice point on the McLeod fiber at the I-40/I-540 exchange in Van Buren near where our MBO fiber crosses I-40. Scott Ramoly and I have another conference call scheduled with MBO’s engineer for August 18 to further investigate the feasibility of building a fiber hut and building fiber to splice the McLeod and MBO fiber. Doing so will potentially eliminate the need for McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa project above, plus it has the technical advantage of reducing the fiber route for our Little Rock/Fayetteville wavelengths by a couple of hundred miles.

7. Juniper Routers: Some of the Juniper equipment (the smaller EX4200 switches) have shipped and should arrive the beginning of this week. The larger MX switches are scheduled to ship August 29. Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia this week (August 18-22). The power and a portion of the cable ladders have been installed at the Harmon parking deck, plus the new Dell racks are on-site. The cut-tiles for the racks should be ready August 18. Scott Ramoly will complete the installation of the racks and final cable ladders while Steven is in class this week. Steven has been conversing with OneNet about the temporary use of a second 10G port on their border router to facilitate the migration to the new MX960 router. OneNet has been very helpful to us throughout our planning. They have agreed to do some special routing configurations for us that make our routing model work for the ARE-ON membership.

8. Fiber Laterals Construction: We anticipated having the preliminary fee estimate from the engineering firm of McClelland/CT&T last Friday (August 15) so that a contract and statement of work could be negotiated and finalized, but Facilities Management had not received the estimate at last word on Friday. I asked Bob Beeler of Facilities Management to get us to the stage where we could meet with McClelland when I return on Friday, August 22, to begin the detailed statement of work for planning and constructing the fiber laterals. Scott Ramoly has started working on updates to the documents that we will deliver to McClelland describing each of the fiber routes to be built.

9. NOC: As promised Steve Peck from the Indiana University Global NOC sent me a document listing the types of services that they offer. They are very receptive to building a proposal for after hours (night/weekend/holiday) coverage for ARE-ON so that we can be assured that our telephone will be answered by network engineering staff 24x7x365. Additional conference calls are planned. It is likely that we will have to put out an RFP for these services, although the GRNOC has some very intriguing unique software in their toolset that we are anxious to get our hands on.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The LifeSize units and TV stands should arrive the week of August 18-22. The timing on the installation should coincide with the installation of the new Juniper EX4200 switches the following week so that each of the two LifeSize units in our building will have ARE-ON IP addresses.

11. iPhones: Steven Karp and Scott Ramoly received their iPhones this past week; I should receive mine this week (unfortunately, I will be out of town for most of the week). The browser on the iPhone has very good support for PNG graphics files, which is a major consideration for us switching to the iPhone. Many of our network management systems use PNG files for graphs, and these were simply unreadable due to extremely primitive support in the Windows Mobile platform. Steven is investigating a Secure Shell client, which is another important feature for us. Having mobile access into our equipment wherever we are without having to have a laptop will be very important to our responsiveness in a critical outage setting.

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 have gotten the okay from Cisco to use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for the Routing and BGP Training workshop that we are planning for the ARE-ON member network engineering staff. We will have date nailed down this week. Tentatively, we are looking at the third or fourth week in September. Steven Karp and David Merrifield will be the instructors for the workshop.

14. Listservs: New listservs for ARE-ON are now ready for use:

AREONMC-L = Management Council, closed list
AREONSC-L = Steering Committee, closed list
AREON-L = General announcements and press releases, open list (**)
AREONUSER-L = User discussion, open list
AREONNEWS = Technical alerts and updates, open list
AREON-EWG = Engineering Working Group, closed list
AREONSTAFF = ARE-ON Staff, closed list

(** The AREON-L list is being used for another purpose, but will be available by the end of August for open subscription.)

15. State Technology Council: I will be attending the first meeting of the State Technology Council on August 18 in Little Rock.

16. Director of Administration and Planning: Our engineering team had the opportunity to meet with and interview the leading candidate for the new position on August 14.

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

Status Report - August 11, 2008

2008-08-10T21:39:00.000-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 11, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment: The evaluation committee is scheduled to meet on August 27 in Little Rock where we will have presentations and best & final offers from each of the top three vendors. These vendors are (in alphabetical order) ADVA Optical Networking, AT&T (Cisco), and ePlus Technology (Cisco). The committee will meet immediately after the presentations to score the proposals with the intent to make a final recommendation.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: We are still awaiting the new appendix for our existing McLeod Dark Fiber Capacity Services Agreement that will add the Little Rock to Monroe fiber route. I have asked the Monroe sales rep to have this wrapped up by the end of this week (August 15).

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: Based on the last update that we received (August 4) from the City attorney, the agreement is in Time Warner’s hands awaiting their review. TWTC was awaiting the return of a key reviewer from maternity leave.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have our meeting with Ritter on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: We are still awaiting word from McLeod and Indian Nations Fiber Optic on the issue of taking our McLeod fiber and the end of the INFO/OneNet fiber in MH1081 into the AT&T building. The Van Buren/MBO discussion (below) may eliminate the need for this cross-connect.

6. Van Buren/MBO: Scott Ramoly and I had a conference call with MBO’s engineer last Thursday (August 7) during which we discussed possibly building a splice between our MBO fiber and McLeod fiber in the Van Buren/Alma area. Our MBO Fayetteville/Fort Smith fiber route passes about 3000 feet from a McLeod splice point, which may be an ideal location for us to join the two fibers. It would probably necessitate building a fiber hut in the vicinity. If we can pull this off, we will eliminate the need to do the McLeod/OneNet project in Tulsa, plus we can save substantial dollars in the optical network design by not having to send our Little Rock/Fayetteville traffic to Tulsa and back.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper equipment is tentatively scheduled to ship August 15 (for the smaller EX4200 switches) and September 1 (for the MX switches). Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia the week of August 18-22. The power and a portion of the cable ladders have been installed. We anticipate arrival of the new racks to house the equipment this week. Steven has met with the UAF network staff and they have a migration plan for installing our new Fayetteville core Juniper MX960 and migrating the campus connection off the Force10 router.

8. Fiber Construction: We met with Facilities Management and the engineering firm of McClelland/CT&T on Thursday (August 7) to initiate the contract and fee negotiation. McClelland plans to have the numbers ready for a preliminary budget by Friday, August 15. They are ready to begin the engineering and design as soon as the contract is approved. As soon as the contract is inked, we will immediately start them with engineering the Fort Smith, Russellville, Conway, and Little Rock builds.

9. NOC: We had a conference call with the Indiana University Global NOC on Thursday (August 7) during which we had a brief discussion about the possibility of using the GRNOC for off-hours (night/weekend/holiday) coverage for ARE-ON. They have a rather comprehensive set of NOC services available, most of which are outlined in a document they sent us that describes their service focus areas. We plan additional conference calls to develop a proposal and cost estimate.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The three LifeSize units have been ordered. The LCD TV monitors have already been purchased, as have two TV stands. I do not have an ETA on the arrival of our LifeSize units yet. A new conference table has been installed in Mike’s office.

11. iPhones: We are still awaiting the arrival of the new iPhones for Steven, Scott, and David.

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 are kicking around ideas of workshops that we will host for our ARE-ON member campuses and interested parties. The following are a few of the ideas under consideration. The Routing and BGP Training class will be scheduled for mid-September. Cisco has offered to let us use their lab and conference room in Little Rock for that class, which will enable the use of live Cisco routers as well as our own Juniper lab routers during the class.

Routing and BGP Training
ARE-ON Network Operations Center (trouble reporting, network statistics, etc.)
Introduction to National Research Networks (Internet2 and National LambdaRail)
IPv4 Multicast Training
IPv6 Training
Identity Management, Federations, and Shibboleth
Traffic Engineering
Network Performance Workshop for Network Engineers
Network Performance Workshop for Applications and Research Staff
Visualization
DNSSEC Implementation
Security and Privacy Topics in Higher Education and ARE-ON
High Performance Computing for the Network Engineer
Extending Storage Area Networks over the WAN
Video Conferencing Implementation

14. Listservs: Requests to create new listservs for ARE-ON discussions have been submitted:

AREONMC-L = Management Council, closed list
AREONSC-L = Steering Committee, closed list
AREON-L = General announcements and press releases, open list
AREONUSER-L = User discussion, open list
AREONNEWS = Technical alerts and updates, open list
AREON-EWG = Engineering Working Group, closed list
AREONSTAFF = ARE-ON Staff, closed list

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

Status Report - August 6, 2008

2008-08-08T15:25:00.001-05:00

Here is the ARE-ON status report for August 6, 2008:

1. DWDM equipment: The evaluation committee is meeting with the top three vendors on August 27 (tentatively) where we will get final presentations, Q&A, and a best & final offer using our latest network design. The committee will meet immediately after the presentations to score the proposals with the intent to make a final recommendation.

2. Little Rock/Monroe IRU: After getting the word from AT&T that we were not going to be able to use their fiber, I got McLeod to give us a quote. It came in at $XXXX/strand/mile. Last year it was $YYY/strand/mile. I asked the rep to sharpen his pencil, hoping that we could get the $YYY price back, and didn’t hear back from him for quite a while. Last week I pinged him again, and he wrote back with a new quote at $ZZZZ/strand/mile. Maintenance is $AAA/mile/year. I asked him to draw up the paperwork, which will be a simple amendment to our existing IRU contract.

3. Little Rock/Time Warner Telecom: The agreement is in Time Warner’s hands awaiting their review of the last revision from the City. We are awaiting the return of a Time Warner reviewer from maternity leave.

4. Ritter/Jonesboro: Mike Abbiatti and I have a meeting with Ritter Communications on August 19. Their engineer has asked if we would be interested in an IRU for one or more pairs of Entergy fiber that extends from Memphis into downtown Little Rock. I have asked for a fiber route map through the Little Rock area and am still awaiting that map. Till we see where the fiber goes, we can’t make any judgment on its usefulness to us.

5. McLeod/OneNet/Tulsa: Scott Ramoly and I went to Tulsa on August 6 to meet with McLeod, AT&T, Indian Nations Fiber Optic, OneNet, and a City of Tulsa engineer about connecting the end of our McLeod fiber to OneNet fiber to reach the OneNet demarc at the OSU Tulsa campus. There were several options discussed, the most logical one being to take the ends of the McLeod fiber and the OneNet/INFO fiber into the AT&T building, but every indication is that AT&T may be a roadblock. It’s apparently a ILEC vs. CLEC issue. We may be able to get around this telco regulation stuff by approaching AT&T as two higher ed networks needing connectivity. If we get into a jam, we might want to get Kevin Kremer, the AT&T VP that we met with last week to look into this for us. The Van Buren discussion (below) may eliminate the need for this cross-connect.

6. Van Buren/MBO: We have MBO fiber that goes from Fayetteville to Fort Smith to Tulsa, and McLeod fiber that goes from Little Rock to Fort Smith to Tulsa. We have initiated discussions with MBO about possibly tying these two together near where they cross somewhere in the Alma and Van Buren area. We have provided information to MBO and are trying to schedule a conference call with them this week to go over our ideas and listen to their solutions. If we can make this work, we can avoid having to light the McLeod fiber between Fort Smith and Tulsa and shorten the path that lambdas take between Fayetteville and Tulsa by a couple of hundred miles. We want to use cost savings in Tulsa to pay for this.

7. Juniper Routers: The Juniper equipment is tentatively scheduled to ship August 15 (for the smaller EX4200 switches) and September 1 (for the MX switches). Steven Karp will be attending a Juniper class in Virginia the week of August 18-22. The racks, fiber patches, cable ladders and fiber management, power, etc. for installing these have already been ordered and will be ready before the Juniper equipment arrives. We will immediately install the routers and schedule a brief outage to migrate our existing network links off the Force10 to the Juniper MX960.

8. Fiber Construction: The approval for the selection of McClelland/CT&T as the engineering firm came through Dr. Sugg’s office. We have a meeting with the company on August 7 to negotiate their fee and to get a contract in place. Facilities Management is driving this process, with our participation and guidance. As soon as the contract is inked, we will immediately start them with engineering the Fort Smith, Russellville, Conway, and Little Rock builds.

9. NOC: We have a conference call with the Indiana University Global NOC on August 7. We will work with them to develop a proposal for off-hours/weekend/holiday NOC coverage. The intent will be to have someone who can answer the phone, do preliminary vetting of the caller, do some preliminary troubleshooting, and notify the ARE-ON on-call engineer. The GRNOC may also do some alarm monitoring for us, but we might just as easily do that ourselves.

10. LifeSize Video Conferencing: The three LifeSize units have been ordered. The LCD TV monitors have already been purchased. I will be selecting the stand that the units in our building will go on on August 7. I have a recommendation on a nice portable stand. I do not have an ETA on the arrival of our LifeSize units yet.

11. Cisco Telepresence: Steven Karp and I went to the Cisco office in Bentonville this morning to see a demo of their Telepresence Center. It’s really attractive technology. We talked with Cisco about the possibility of placing a unit on campus in a technology preview center. They felt that we might be able to get financial support from some large companies in the area and state.

12. iPhones: Ordered for Steven, Scott, and David. We will check them out to be sure that they work before we order Mike's.

13. 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.

-David Merrifield, Chief Technology Officer
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON)