MSPPs IN PLACE: A CONVERSATION WITH JIM CLARK

When Grand River Mutual, an independent operating company (IOC) with about 26,000 access lines in Missouri and Iowa, outgrew the OC-12 backbone in the eastern part of its network, the company decided to replace it with an OC-48. To enable the change, GRM narrowed its choice of system vendors to three leading candidates: Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems and a lesser-known vendor named Turin Networks, which won the bid. GRM’s equipment supervisor Jim Clark explains why to Telephony's Ed Gubbins.

On the RFP: We narrowed it down to three vendors: Nortel, Cisco and Turin. The numbers we came up with originally were for an OC-48 but we put in an alternative for OC-192, and originally we thought the price was going to be sky high and it wouldn’t be an option. Much to our surprise, the dollars we got from Turin looked very attractive. The highest bid was, I think, $935,000. The lowest bid was like $725,000 or $735,000 for the Turin OC-48 bid. For the OC-192, the dollars that came back from Turin just shocked us. They were less than double what the OC-48 would be and had four times the capacity.

On the perks: [The Turin MSPP] has [digital crossconnect] functionality as well. One of the things that was extremely important to us was the ability to incorporate Ethernet. Say you establish STSs between a couple exchanges. You can break up that 48 Mb/s into physical connections. You can have an RJ45 port and take out whatever bandwidth you want out of that 48 Mb/s and map it to a physical port on another exchange. We broke it up, took 10 Mb/s for a LAN connection for our switches, 10 Mb/s for dialup, another 10 Mb/s for DSL equipment in the COs, another 10 Mb/s as a DSL connection for digital loop carriers, and we have 8 Mb/s left over we can move around whenever it’s needed. It lets us make very efficient use of the bandwidth we’ve mapped out. We built STSs between our Princeton, Missouri offices for Ethernet; that’s how we’re backhauling our DSL from these outlying exchanges into our core router in Princeton. It eliminated the need for having routers out there in the outlying exchanges; you just take an Ethernet switch and plug into that, and it’s like a big LAN.

On differentiators: One of the things I thought was unique is you can maintain DS-1 visibility in their system. All the nodes I looked at, if you put a DS-3 card in the chassis and take them down to a device that converts DS-3s to DS-1s, you lose visibility to the T-1 level. Turin has an Ethernet connection in its software that gives you DS-1 visibility that no one else can do. That was important. I wanted the ability to look at the T-1s in our network from a centralized location. Nortel and Cisco could not do that. If the bean-counters would give me the money, I’d love to use the Turin [MSPP] throughout our network. That would allow me to look at any T-1 and do an ingress anywhere in our network from one centralized management location without the need to send someone there to pull jumpers and look and verify.