Dallas in a tear-down mood

City builds a voice-over-IP network with help from Cisco, SBC Dallas is ready to tear down its telecommunications infrastructure, then, with help from SBC Communications and Cisco Systems, build it back up.

The new network will use more fiber than can be found in a freight train full of shredded wheat to deliver advanced data services and voice over IP to about 300 sites across the city.

"We had a really broken foundation in the city, and this voice over IP will fix it," said Dan McFarland, the city's chief information officer. "We want our citizens to be online, not in line."

Dallas awarded SBC's Southwestern Bell unit a $33 million contract to build the new network over the next 12 to 24 months. "We will have 4 million feet of cable, which equates to about 750 miles," McFarland said. "It's a huge project, but we have a lot of people dedicated to this."

In every instance, it will be new - sometimes untested - technology. "It's new technology, but we're going into this project with our eyes open," said Curtis Browne, Southwestern Bell's regional vice president of major accounts.

The network, which uses a fiber backbone and Category 5 cable inside the buildings it connects, will be built in steps.

"The first phase of the project will be to put in a completely new infrastructure, a fiber backbone, tying together all the [seven] core locations of the city," Browne said. "Then we'll tie in an additional 270 remote sites onto that core network using DSL and ATM circuits or T-1 circuits. We plan to run two brand-new Cat 5 drops to every telephone that will be on the system."

Dallas then can migrate services gradually, McFarland said. "We're going to put it into one of our service centers first, make sure that it works and it works correctly. We still have our [10-year-old] Centrex system there, and we'll cut that out as we go through," McFarland said.

He's not worried that the voice-over-IP gear will be outdated before it's installed or, worse yet, not be up to snuff.

"We realize that voice over IP is in its early stages. We also have a $10 million performance bond that Southwestern Bell put up backing the technology," he said.

Joe Gagan, a senior analyst with The Yankee Group, also dismissed concerns about the technology or things not working. "There are some people who have not developed this product well, who have not taken the necessary steps to install it right, and that's where you find [voice over IP] won't sound as good. It's an execution-type of thing," he said.

The SBC/Cisco collaboration will execute, Gagan predicted. "Cisco's doing very well," he said.

So well, in fact, that SBC selected the California-based networking giant over other long-standing partners. "Lucent and Nortel are two that we partner with and have solutions for as well as Cisco," Browne said. "In this instance, we chose to partner with Cisco. We felt it made the best sense for the city."

Because Dallas has Cisco equipment in its backbone, the city is familiar with that product. And Dallas doesn't have an embedded base of Nortel or Lucent PBXs to complicate things, he said.

"[Dallas was] able to step right into the solution that they felt made the most sense for them, which we felt was Cisco, and I think the city agreed by choosing us as the preferred vendor," Browne said.

McFarland agreed. The SBC bid beat out a Verizon Communications/Nortel partnership and Lucent, he said. "We are taking a quantum leap forward in technology," he said. "We're going to be the first major customer in the U.S. to do a full-blown voice-over-IP conversion."

That, combined with the network's high-speed data capabilities, will vault the city and its residents into the Internet age, McFarland said.