Bridging the T1/T3 Gap - Company Business and Marketing

Telecommunications, April, 2001 by Rich Black, Larry Kraft

Perhaps most important to customers is the MFR/IMA solution's diversity. In a situation where one or more T1s temporarily malfunction, the network continues to operate through the ports of the remaining T1s.

Because the A-1240's T1 ports are software configurable, Intermedia was able to provision and change services on each port remotely. With any-to-any features and software configurable ports, all changes could be made through software. After operational readiness testing, Intermedia knew it had found the ground-breaking solution it needed.

Current Status

With ASC's products deployed in local PoPs (see Figure 1), Intermedia became the nation's first major carrier to offer standards-based, multilink frame relay service to commercial customers. Today, Intermedia's MFR and IMA services are available nationwide and at substantially reduced cost. Intermedia already sees considerable demand for IMA services and expects MFR demand to grow rapidly. As more SMBs run out of capacity with existing T1 circuits, Intermedia's new services enabled by the ASC A-1240 will allow them to grow their bandwidth seamlessly up to 12 Mbps, or eight T1s.

Intermedia has several customers actively using its services and others awaiting installations for beta trials. Parson Group has found Intermedia's MFR solution to be a cost-effective, scalable, easy-to-provision answer to its growing bandwidth needs.

Based in Chicago, Parson Group provides accounting, finance, and merger and acquisition consulting to corporations nationwide. With 900 employees in 14 locations, Parson Group relies on Intermedia's frame relay service to provide dedicated, secure connectivity for all its branch offices.

The company's rapid growth recently caused a bandwidth dilemma. Having outstripped its capacity on an Intermedia T1 access line, Parson Group faced two options: order a T3, which would far exceed current bandwidth needs; or order another T1, which would be expensive and difficult to install.

"We wanted scalability and ease of deployment," said Karen Dorencz, senior information technology specialist at Parson Group. "With MFR, the two T1s become a virtual 3 Mbps pipe that serves all our data transport requirements." It also allows for future growth to 12 Mbps.

Tricia Gurr, Intermedias frame relay product manager, said dozens of companies are facing a similar bandwidth gap. "Businesses are becoming more and more data dependent, and that is exactly where Intermedia is focusing its new service offerings. With ASC's innovative, cost-effective solutions, Intermedia brings fractional T3 services to a segment of users that had great difficulty justifying a T3, but that also found T3s not readily available," Gurr said.

Rich Black is vice president of marketing services for Intermedia.

Larry Kraft is vice president of marketing for Advanced Switching Communications.