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The Transparent LAN: A Municipal Fiber System Simplifies Business Networking
By Sandy Crusenberry, Bristol Virginia Utilities
Mar 26, 2007, 10:20

Bristol Virginia Utilities had the first municipal fiber system to offer triple-play residential and business services. Now the company is creating new business services that enable flexible networks between business branches and facilitate telecommuting and disaster recovery.

Conventional wisdom says that a municipally owned utility company can not and should not compete in the fast-paced, technology-driven world of telecommunication and information services. Bristol Virginia Utilities (BVU) set out to prove the naysayers wrong: It built the first municipally owned fiber-to-the-user system to offer the triple play of phone, video and broadband data services, and took its primary market by storm.

After less than four years in business, competing with heavy-hitting incumbents, BVU now serves 65 percent of the homes and businesses in its service area – and this in a metropolitan area where, according to Nielsen studies, only 65 percent of the population subscribe to any form of cable television.

Customers obviously appreciate BVU’s customer service, its technical support and the affordable and stable rates it charges for its services. But it’s the fiber infrastructure, and the bandwidth that this infrastructure affords, that gives BVU a leg up from both an economic development and a service-level standpoint.

BVU's goal: to customize LAN solutions for its business clients.

During the early planning stages of the project, BVU decided to invest in a future-proof fiber network that could stand the test of time, and then to layer on services as technology advanced and new services became available. One of the company’s most important goals was to be flexible enough to provide customized solutions for its business clients, according to BVU network architect Mark Lane, who notes: “Our OptiNet LAN, a Transparent LAN Service (TLS), is a great example of how BVU adapts products and services to meet the needs of our business customers.”
 

Business Networks in the “Cloud”

Traditionally, companies connecting multiple offices for high-speed data exchange have had to use Time Division Multiplex (TDM) circuits – the same kind of circuits used for ordinary telephone service. The problem with TDM circuits is that they are either very expensive or very slow.

High-speed lines (ranging from DS3 at 45 Mbps to OC12 at 622 Mbps) cost thousands of dollars per month and also require investment in expensive fiber terminals and other specialized equipment. Small and medium businesses with limited budgets are often restricted to T1 lines with a bandwidth of 1.544 Mbps, or to even lower-capacity lines. These lines range in price from $300 to $800 per month in the Tri-Cities TN/VA market, depending on the distances between locations.

Traditional business networking solutions tend to be either slow or expensive.

Since all of these connections are point-to-point, businesses have to purchase a separate circuit to connect each remote branch back to the data center. Frame relay, when it is available, can reduce the number of point-to-point circuits, but the per-Mbps cost of all TDM services is still relatively high, no matter how you slice it.

Lane explains, “With our fiber access network, BVU can offer customers an alternative to TDM. We deliver our OptiNet LAN service using Ethernet over fiber. Ethernet has been around since the mid-1970s and is available off the shelf in speeds ranging from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. It is the standard local area network technology used by most businesses today, and is well known for its low-cost/high-performance characteristics.”

With Ethernet over fiber, LAN service can be both fast and inexpensive.

Using Ethernet over fiber allows BVU to create a “data cloud” for the connection of all branch offices throughout the region. BVU simply connects each participating site into the cloud, allowing each site to communicate with all others. This solution provides higher bandwidth and simplified connectivity and management at a lower cost per Mbps – a winning formula from the customer's perspective. BVU offers this service, starting at 2 Mbps, to compete with standard T1 service offered by the incumbent telecom operator. However, bandwidth levels can be tailored to meet any customer’s specific needs, something that is neither practical nor affordable in the TDM world.

Supporting Disaster Recovery

Bristol businesses that house their own servers have often forgone disaster recovery or paid steep prices for hot sites or disaster recovery facilities in metropolitan areas like Atlanta or Charlotte. Now those businesses can house their disaster-recovery servers right in their own community, in BVU’s environmentally controlled, secure data center. Customers use the OptiNet LAN to connect their primary data centers to the remote data centers at BVU facilities.

This layered service, which is enabled by Transparent LAN Services, gives business owners 24x7x365 access to a trained support staff – a benefit that most small and midsized businesses can not afford in house. Businesses can also avoid sending employees on three-to-five-hour drives to upgrade server software and address other maintenance issues. BVU also handles tape rotations as needed.
 

Telecommuting Made Easy

Another killer application involves overlaying a private Transparent LAN Service that connects the business branches with employees’ homes for dynamic telecommuting. Many businesses are giving employees the option to work from home using Internet-based virtual private network (VPN) connections. However, best-effort Internet services with low upstream bandwidths, spotty performance and multi-vendor technical complexity often make telecommuting an exercise in frustration.

By contrast, BVU’s fiber-to-the-premises network gives telecommuters lightning-fast speeds both upstream and downstream, along with a “connected to the corporate LAN” experience. Businesses tell us that telecommuting never looked so good!

The remarkable thing about technology is that it serves little purpose until it’s applied to human needs and desires. What makes technology effective and useful is the “killer applications” that make life – and business – a little easier, a lot less expensive and much more interesting.

About the Author: Sandy Crusenberry joined Bristol Virginia Utilities as Marketing and Business Development Director in September 2003, shortly after the official launch of triple-play services to the company’s initial market area.  Since then, she has led marketing efforts that have aided in increasing that primary market penetration to 65 percent.