Circling the wagons: South Dakota Independents share facilities for self-healing rings

Some Independent South Dakota telephone companies are hoping that they can better compete with their neighboring Bell company by combining forces.

South Dakota Network, an interexchange carrier owned by 15 Independents, is working with 14 Independents to put together three self-healing fiber rings by combining existing facilities.

"Companies like AT&T, Sprint and Williams would buy transport across South Dakota from SDN," said Mark Shlanta, SDN's network planning and operations director. "We've begun to pick up business from IXCs. We can provide [failure] protection at prices lower than U S West."

The initiative was spurred by a measure passed last spring by the South Dakota legislature. SDN and its participating companies sponsored the legislation, which precludes antitrust complaints from competitors by mandating that interexchange-switched traffic travel on self-healing rings and encouraging facilities sharing.

The legislation cemented a long-standing plan, said Darrell Henderson, president of SDN's board and general manager of West River Cooperative Telephone Co.

The rings project "has been in planning for a couple of years," Henderson said. "We worked hard to get that bill though. We needed it to allow infrastructure sharing."

The South Dakota situation is unusual, said Cimi Corp. President Tom Nolle, but he expects to see more such facilities-sharing arrangements. States and municipalities are pushing for better telecom infrastructure to attract businesses and residents, and competition will force service providers to create self-healing networks, he said.

"Cooperation is a means of accelerating competition," Nolle said, adding that Independents would have been forced to build self-healing networks or be forced out of the market.

SDN's first ring was activated on Oct. 22, and the second is expected to begin carrying traffic by the end of the year (see figure). The third ring is expected to launch in late 1999.