It's a wonderful life?

To commemorate the Christmas season, I'd like to tell you a little tale that might help you see the value of friendship over profit.

It's the story of a small-town banker in northern Vermont who goes against the local big-business tycoons to find a better way to help his customers. Sound familiar?

It's not the story of George Bailey in the holiday classic "It's a Wonderful Life." It's real life.

Craig Lantagne is senior vice president of operations at Passumpsic Saving Bank in St. Johnsbury, Vt.

Earlier this year, Lantagne was given the task of moving the bank's data processing department to an operations center several miles from the main office. He needed high-speed data links because the bank keeps optical versions of checks and loan papers, as well as other important banking documents on the system.

What's more, Lantagne also needed to replace an old AT&T phone system. "I wanted to have the two buildings so intertwined that you wouldn't know which building you were in," Lantagne said.

Looking for both a WAN data connection and a new phone system, he called his local exchange carrier, Nynex. What he thought would be a slam-dunk turned out to be anything but.

Lantagne first thought ISDN could do some of the job, but ISDN wasn't available in his area.

Then he considered a T-1 line but knew that wouldn't be enough for the kinds of optical data traffic he expected. Nynex offered multiple T-1s, even fiber, but the cost of linking his two buildings together would be upwards of $4000 a month-not including the cost for a new phone system, which easily could have cost $60,000 to $70,000.

So, he left Nynex and went looking for another option. The much smaller Twin States Telephone Co., a reseller of Mitel PBX switching equipment, offered an alternative that piqued his interest. Mitel and data equipment vendor Madge Networks had developed a switch that could handle both voice and data. And the equipment-the SX-2000 Light Nevada switch system, which is engineered to run at asynchronous transfer mode speeds of 155 Mb/s-cost less than what Nynex quoted for a voice switch.

Today, Lantagne has a full 155 Mb/s fiber link between his new operations center and his old bank headquarters. The link is maintained by Helicon Cable Co. at the suggestion of Twin States.

The cost? Here's where it sounds a bit like a movie-even to Lantagne. The full two-mile, eight-strand fiber link costs him just $500 a month. My mind was racing to do the math, and Lantagne confirmed my suspicions-an ATM link for less than Nynex wanted to charge for a T-1.

And as if that were not enough, Lantagne also had five regional branches he wanted to tie into his optical network. Nynex suggested a point-to-point meshed network composed of 56 kb/s links.

His new friends at Helicon had a better answer there, too. They placed an Ethernet hub at each of the branches and routed all the traffic through their own switch at the Helicon facility. Then traffic was redirected as needed-either back to another branch or to the main operations center. Cost? A flat fee of $100 a month per line.

The upshot of all this is that for less than $160,000, Lantagne now has a total hardware and leased-line package that will give him the data and voice capacity he needs to keep customers and employees happy.

Can these small resellers and a group of cable guys really compete with big, bad Nynex? "We did have a problem during installation," Lantagne concedes, but proudly adds, "They were excellent-came here that day to figure it out. In a day it was fixed, and we haven't had a problem in more than a month and a half.

"We couldn't have done all this without deregulation. But it's pretty clear, too, that deregulation is going to take some toll here on those that don't wake up.

Merry Christmas to all.

Vance McCarthy is a freelance writer based in Foster City, Calif. His e-mail address is mccarthy@batnet.com.