Bridging the T1/T3 Gap - Company Business and Marketing

Telecommunications, April, 2001 by Rich Black, Larry Kraft

Multilink frame relay the solution for Intermedia Communications.

Because of the recent capital crunch, service providers are struggling to offer differentiated, value-added services that balance revenue potential with capital expense to ensure a solid ROI. In this environment, service providers are determined to find the most cost-effective means of deploying best-of-breed technologies and services.

Intermedia Communications Inc., a Tampa-based integrated communications provider, faced the challenge of providing intermediary bandwidth options. It wanted a standards-based solution that would give its frame relay and ATM customers incremental bandwidth capacities between 1.5 Mbps and 45 Mbps. In search of a quick, economical answer, Intermedia turned to ASC.

Founded in 1987, Intermedia delivers comprehensive voice and broadband data solutions including local and long-distance, high-speed Internet access, and advanced network access services to SMBs (small and midsize businesss). Intermedia also serves ISPs, financial service institutions, multitenant office buildings, business services and governments with single, multiple, regional, national or international sites. With nearly $1 billion in annual revenue, Intermedia operates the country's fourth-largest frame relay network. Its 200 data switches and 1000+ network-to-network interfaces provide nearly 100 percent local access transport area coverage for frame relay. Intermedia has one of the best SLA guaranteeing 99.999-percent network availability between two POPs.

The Challenge

Unprecedented demand for widely diverse advanced services, many IP-based, continues to grow. Industry analysts estimate that the number of broadband users in the United States alone will double in the next two years to more than 30 million. To remain competitive, grow their networks and offer new services, providers must integrate their existing array of multiservice, multiprotocol networks. Every dollar invested must yield a rapid, significant return.

End users are demanding faster, dedicated Internet access and increased broadband capacities for services such as multimedia; secure, accessible intranets; business-enhancing extranets connecting them to customers and suppliers; simple, universally available video conferencing; distance learning; and service-on-demand.

With increased use of these bandwidth-intensive applications, Intermedia's SMB customers were beginning to reach capacity on their T1 access services.

Traditionally, their next option would be a T3--a dramatic increase in bandwidth to 45 Mbps and a tenfold increase in monthly costs. Customers who could afford this increase found themselves with large, underutilized pipes. Intermedia wanted to address the growing bandwidth demand by deploying a standards-based technology that would bundle T1 circuits into a new virtual pipe to provide intermediate bandwidth levels.

Intermedia, however, did not have widely available bundling solutions for ATM and frame relay. Previously, the company had deployed proprietary highspeed frame relay solutions in select locations, but they offered a maximum of 6 Mbps and could not be deployed widely, cost-effectively or efficiently.

ASC's Solution

Intermedia needed to find a company that could offer bundled services without changing the customer's existing equipment. ASC had introduced a standards-based multiplexing solution for frame relay in 1999 and was willing to partner closely with Intermedia and work rapidly to roll out a nationwide service. Most interesting to Intermedia was ASC's ability to provide multiple services and multiple protocols on a port-by-port basis. After several months of operational testing and a beta trial, Intermedia was ready to roll out services with ASC's A-1240 broadband access platform.

The A-1240 allows Intermedia to deploy IMA (inverse multiplexing over ATM) and MFR (multilink frame relay) services cost-effectively, anywhere in the country. At the time, few equipment vendors had integrated FRF.16, the new standard for bundling frame relay T1 connections. Existing IMA solutions for ATM traffic from other vendors involved dedicating one card to each customer--expensive overkill.

The A-1240's ability to support multiple ATM and frame relay customers on the same card provided a dramatic savings over other solutions that required separate cards for these protocols. ASC not only introduced a new service set for Intermedia, it allowed the company to open new markets by extending its ATM network closer to its customers. Wherever the ASC box was deployed, Intermedia could increase the footprint of its ATM network, something not cost effective with its existing switches.

In comparing ASC's product with others, Intermedia found that the stackable, pizza-box-size A-1240 with 24 T1 ports provided higher port densities and lower costs per customer. Intermedia could use all 24 ports to support any combination of IMA and MFR connections. Additionally, ASC's bundled T1 circuits would not have to be configured on consecutive ports, simplifying provisioning as Intermedia's operations group managed customer churn. For example, if Intermedia signed a new customer for two bundled T1 connections and only ports numbered "2" and "5" were available, Intermedia could assign the connection to those two ports to operate as a single high-speed connection. As a result, the ASG solution enables Intermedia to increase switch capacity, while improving efficiency.