400 LINES TOMORROW? - NO PROBLEM

Provisioning 400 to 600 phone lines on a moment's notice would be a nightmare for most independent telephone companies, but it has become routine business for Valor Telecom.

The Valor Communications Group subsidiary, which owns rural telephone operations in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, counts Crawford, Texas, as one of its local franchise territories. And as most of the free world knows, that's the location of the Prairie Chapel Ranch, better known as the Western White House, where President George W. Bush goes to both vacation and work.

Wherever Bush goes, so goes the press corps. And it is for this media swarm that Valor Telecom was required to develop a fast method of turning up and tearing down hundreds of phone lines, often with little notice.

Valor had just acquired the property from GTE in 2000, the year Bush started his first term.

“Early on and even today, because of the needs of the presidency — for reasons that you would assume, we don't necessarily know the president's schedule until a short time before he arrives,” said Bill Bellando, vice president of network planning and engineering for Valor. “There are times, whenever there is a diplomat or dignitary traveling with the president, where we suddenly have requirements that are needed to be met in hours.

“The typical phone company has procedures in place that take a certain amount of time. We have processes and procedures that are followed, but what may take two to three days to do normally, will now take two to three hours.”

This is all possible because of the careful planning that actually began before Bush was even elected, he said.

“We established a multi-functional group with Valor, including engineering, operations, sales and marketing, to make sure we did try to have those services as needed,” Bellando said. “The purpose of the task force was to look at this and determine what we needed in case Bush was elected.

“Once the election happened, we acted very quickly to get services to the ranch and also in our serving wire center. [We had] to make sure we had enough network to support the president and his entourage because there is a tremendous amount of secondary components needed for press.”

White House officials met with Valor officials to offer information and advice.

“In the very early days, we would sit down and discuss this with various White House and security contingencies,” Bellando said. “They were able to tell us how many press corps people do we have that come in, how many people usually travel with the president, how much data do they need and how much voice.”

Typically, depending on what's going on in the world and who might be traveling with the president, 200 to 600 members of the media tag along. When Bush is on vacation, the number may go down, but when he brings along Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the press corps swells.

That puts pressure on facilities designed to serve a little more than 700 full-time residents.

Two individuals — Area Manager Kevin Smith and Mike Estell from his staff — were the men on the spot in this case.

“They were the lucky ones to have Crawford within their area,” Bellando said with a chuckle. “They were signed up and took amazing ownership to make sure the cables were run, fiber was placed, NG-DLC was placed, trunking in the Class 5 switch was augmented.”

One of the first orders of business was to deploy fiber-optic cable from Crawford to the edge of the Prairie Chapel Ranch property, where Valor deployed a next-generation digital loop carrier (DLC). But Valor also had to make major improvements in the service office, quadrupling the trunk groups up to 500 lines and deploying DSL in Crawford.

The company was already deploying DSL and NG-DLCs elsewhere, so the Crawford deployment could be handled as others had been.

“Crawford is an important place to us for obvious reasons,” Bellando said. “But the NG-DLC structure is something we deployed throughout the network. We were on the warpath to upgrade the network. Our Crawford residents wanted DSL also.”

The company then constructed equipment specifically to deploy lines at a moment's notice and to then take those lines down just as quickly.

“We have actually constructed pieces of equipment that can be rolled up and put in compact locations and then rolled back out,” Bellando said. “Some are left up — the primary basic services needed every day. But most of it comes down.”

This “turn up, tear down” process is a requirement because Crawford doesn't have multiple large hotels or other facilities in which members of the media can work.

“Crawford is a small town, there are about 1000 access lines in that town, and there are not large areas to hold massive groups of people,” he explained. “So the press works out of the school gymnasium most of the time. It would be ideal to keep it up, but you have a limited amount of space, and you have to make it work.”

Valor's specialized equipment can deploy 400 lines into the school gymnasium and 200 lines into another location for the press, in one day, he said.

“We roll out, we reprogram for 400 to 600 lines to different locations in Crawford and instantaneously the DSL lines are turned up in minutes and hours,” Bellando said. “It's an amazing feat — it's like watching the massive construction of a carnival or a circus — it all gets done, and it gets done quickly. We have rolled out 400 lines in less than eight hours.”

For security reasons, Bellando doesn't discuss specifics of equipment or services deployed at the president's ranch. He will say that whenever President Bush is in town, Valor has one person assigned to a cell phone and available around the clock to handle any need that arises.

“We want to address that need very quickly, which is outside the norm of most business practices,” he said. “We look at it as an honor. This is our president, we are honored and privileged to be able to serve him.”

While most aspects of presidential security have changed dramatically since Sept. 11, 2001, there has been little or no change to the presidential phone service at the Prairie Chapel Ranch.

“The phone service has always been very specialized and secure,” Bellando said. “We've always made sure the method of accessing our Class 5 switches was secure. When we started providing service to the president's ranch, we changed out the card readers [for the security card system at the central office]. But that's what we do typically anyway. Our COs and our access are pretty locked down.”

Bellando doesn't know for sure what will happen beyond 2008 for Valor's Crawford operation. While Bush will no longer be president, he is likely to remain politically active in some way — and the town could one day become home to his presidential library, which would pose a very different challenge.