UPDATES - Company Operations

Communications News,  June, 2001  by Sean Kelly

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INTERNET/IP TECHNOLOGIES

No waste with wireless

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC), the nation's second-largest water and wastewater utility, serves more than 1.5 million customers in Maryland's Prince George's and Montgomery counties. To improve its service to such a large customer base, the commission needed to increase the speed of its wireless Interact applications.

Charles Madison, WSSC systems analyst and consultant, recalls, "Our customer care field service representatives would often have a wait of more than four minutes per page, using our wireless network and IP-based field ticket application, to complete an on-site customer transaction."

To overcome the problem, WSSC installed Venturi software from Fourelle Systems, which speeds all IP-based applications over all WANs, including satellite, frame relay, wireless, dial-up, cable and DSL, and integrates into remote access server and VPN environments. The software maximizes use and efficiency of current network links, eliminating the need to add capacity by purchasing additional access.

Madison says that Venturi brought the waiting time down to 10 to 30 seconds per page--allowing faster response to more customers. Because all WSSC applications use the company's wireless network and Venturi software, performance improvements are evident throughout the commission. For example, during open enrollment for employee benefits, human resources can make changes in real time--instead of gathering paperwork and entering paper-based changes into another system. Internet applications are now up to 300% faster across the commission's WAN, while significantly reducing bandwidth requirements and packet count.

www.fourelle.com

Circle 260 for more information from Fourelle Systems

CABLING/ WIRING AND CABINETS

Rack 'em up

FASTNET, a Bethlehem, PA-based ISP, needed reliable enclosures to protect its 12th data center, which takes up half of the company's recently completed 15,000-square-foot co-location center. Because the data center provides customers with Web, e-commerce and application hosting, and disaster recovery data storage, the proper enclosures were needed to guard the center network and its critical data.

"We're only as good as our weakest link," says Rafe Scheinblum, executive VP of operations. "If an enclosure fails for any reason, or if we can't properly mount equipment, that becomes a significant problem in terms of servicing and--more critically--customer downtime."

The company established parameters for the enclosures, in terms of cable management, universal mounting, ventilation and customization. As a result, FASTNET chose WRK network enclosures from DataTel, a division of Middle Atlantic Products.

"The WRK is strong and rugged, and can stand up to the rigors of the customer environment," explains Scheinblum. The enclosures meet the Uniform Building Code seismic zone 4 upper floor requirements, for protecting 1,000 pounds of essential equipment. "We've taken all the steps necessary to ensure this data center is environmentally protected and sound. The DataTel enclosures play an important role in making sure the center stays that way," Scheinblum notes.

www.datatelracks.com

Circle 266 for more information from Middle Atlantic Products

NETWORK MANAGEMENT

Pump it up

Richmond, British Columbia, Canada,--a city of 150,000 located on an island of the Fraser River, just south of Vancouver--has 180 pumping stations critical to operating the drainage dike, sanitary system and water supply.

Each pump station's radio antenna sends alarms and station data to the central supervisory control and data acquisition computer monitor systems 24x7--about two million transactions per week. Such critical information determines numbers and locations of new pumps, the condition of older ones and the impact of new developments.

Entire neighborhoods could be flooded, for example, if drainage systems are unable to meet demands of new development or heavy downpours. Richmond planners had millions of lines of data--but little useful intelligence.

Edward Hung, manager of Richmond's advanced research and technologies team, notes, "We have a great system for monitoring and control, but it was weak on the reporting side. Something as simple as finding out how many alarms came in the night before would take a day."

To gain intelligence about this data, Richmond turned to WebFOCUS from Information Builders. The product taps into the proprietary database in which all that data is stored, and has powerful reporting and analysis capabilities. The solution's ability to publish reports on the Web allows the city to widely disseminate that intelligence, even to users of wireless devices. WebFOCUS significantly reduces the time required to generate meaningful summaries, and allows the engineering staff to centralize historical data for long-range development planning.

City officials with access to the website can now view recent alerts, such as pumps experiencing mechanical failures, sanitary sewage tanks getting too full, or city streets approaching freezing temperatures. Officials can also view trend information, including how hard each pump is working, how often it has failed in the past, and how its load or activity changes. Public works crews in the field or engineers in planning meetings can now pull down useful intelligence on PDAs about the city's infrastructure.