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Bandwidth in Little Rock, AR?
ioctl asks: "My company needs a 45Mb link from mid-town Little Rock, AR (University exit, I-630) to North Little Rock, AR (Wildwood exit, I-167). Our telco doesn't have any glass in the area, and wants about $800K over the next 5 years to build it out. We looked at another local provider who has the buildout already done, but their tech didn't show for the initial meeting (My boss: "He forgot it?!?!"). We've also looked into doing wireless via TCBY Tower (Proxim Tsunami or Aeras Networks Wavelink), but they are > $80K, plus rooftop space. Does bandwidth have to be this expensive? Are there any other possible solutions?"
A van full of hard drives. OK, it's probably not applicable, but you didn't mention your latency requirements ;-) Might look good in your report as evidence of "thinking outside the box", though.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Dunno, 80k for a wireless link with just the minimal of support fees sounds good, especially for 45mbps. Considering the facts that theres no telco fees involved with a wireless point-to-point solutions (unless i'm being extremely dumb).
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
Seriously, call the company, ask to talk to the president of the company, explain to them that his tech almost cost him a major deal, and asks if he still wants one.
:)
Oh, and if you get on good terms with that company, let them know there's at least one network engineer laid off from an international Tier 1 provider living in Dallas, Texas, who talked you into giving him another chance and would looove to move in and replace that tech
Get off my launchpad!
I'm not familiar with the area, but you can MUX a handful of Ts together I suppose. If your still in the 0-mile area of a provider, that might not be too horribly expensive. I don't know what Ts cost out there tho. If you don't need more'n about 10Mbps, this might work. I think the most I've ever seen MUX'd is 8 Ts.
I'm no expert, but DS3 lines (capable of up to 45Mbps) run over copper just fine. You're probably better off if you can get fibre, but copper will do in a pinch.
my company just recently switched from an OC-12 to a pair of gigabit fiber connections between our Conway and Little Rock offices... no idea how much we pay per month for it, but SBC *was* able to do it.
The story submitter should call the local firm back. Don't get me wrong, I realize that the tech left a bad impression (i.e. is bad service going to dog them through their dealings with the company?), and the folks probably feel snubbed. However, as someone else pointed out, this is not a multimillion dollar deal. It's bad, but people also do occasionally forget things. Heck, I've made a couple of mistakes and oversights in my life, and I've been glad when people give me a chance to make good on it. Maybe the guy's wife just broke up with him, maybe some other company kept having emergencies that he had to handle and got overwhelmed, forgetting about the appointment. Maybe his PDA that he used to keep appointments with was stolen and he's been trying to adapt to using pen-and-paper. Who knows?
Giving folks a chance to make one mistake, unless you're in a situation where a particular mistake absolutely cannot happen is not a bad idea. It can't hurt (aside from a bit of the submitter's time) to bring the people in. He can always decide not to go with them. Given the amount of money on the line, it seems like worthwhile being gracious may be worthwhile.
Also, as others have pointed out, have you considered all possibilities? Do you really need a 45Mbps link? Can you get away with mirroring some fileservers on each side, or something along those lines? We don't really have any idea of what you're doing.
Just a thought -- It might also be worthwhile to hire a local network engineering consultant to give his advice as to what's best to do. He might know of worthwhile things that other local companies have done.
You might consider working a deal with any other businesses interested in doing the same thing and maybe even the city. If there are other businesses that desperately need network connectivity or could reduce their ISP fees by joining into such a thing, perhaps the people asking $800K could be made to give a better deal, or at least split costs.
If you decide to do rooftop links, remember that the failure conditions are different from lines. Depending upon the sort of system you decide upon, bad weather can negatively impact your link.
[Sigh] There's just so little information that it's hard to give more than very basic guesses as to what you want to do.
May we never see th
you could estabilish such a link by getting your own satellite, it can't be used for both or uplinks though, ... for a downlink it would be satisfying.
... not much, but seems to be]
but still
[our whole town has a max of 20mb line i think]
[100 000 residents
[satisfying it seems]
[what r u people doing there, downloading the "internet"?]
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
The question is why they are talking to a "tech" to begin with. Call the Sales Department -- those guys are on commission and won't forget to show up.
might it cost less than $80k to move the company to where the bandwidth you desire is available?
Move whatever operations that require 45MBps to an area where high speed fiber is available.
Paying outrageous fees or investing lots of money into oddball technology is retarded these days. You don't have to look hard to find industrial or commercial areas where high-speed telco access has already been installed by a local government or development authority, or where the state government will give you tax breaks or grants to install such equipment.
Universities operate tech parks as well, here's an example of a successful one as well:
http://www.rpitechpark.com/aboutpark.php
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You City and County planers might know of an area in town that would be better suited to your needs.
You local Economic Development Commision might also be willing to help out. Tell them you are looking to move out of the Town, County, and maybe State. They might have grants and Tax incentives to help you.
Anything doing with computers is still considered high tech and usually clean. Planners love software development firms. Ask them for help to keep you there. That is what they get paid to do.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's ridiculous! Haven't you ever heard of the Cantenna? Just stick a couple of those on your roof and you are good to go!. ;-)
Pigeons...lots of pigeons...
That's why they need the 45mb connection.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
re your sig: you do know that you don't get mod points if you post too often, right?
It may be NOT that expensive. And you cut the middle man...
how long until
Have you checked into Time Warner?
They have Metro Area ethernet in a lot of major cities, and pricing is damn good. Here in Minneapolis, I can do gigabit Fibre Channel between offices. Now that's just damn cool. Not sure about little rock, but it may be worth looking into. Time Warner Telecom has the benefit of being able to use Time Warner Cable's right-of-way. Which means that when they run fiber, they don't have to get permits and go through as much hassle because in the early 80's cable companies were granted huge rights which allowed them to pretty much run cable wherever they pleased without having to get permits. And, if your location makes business sense to TW, they will finance the cost of the install (like if there are other large potential customers in your building).
Although, for the recurring monthly cost of a link like this, after 10 to 12 months, you could have just paid for that wireless solution you were looking at. Keep in mind 802.15.3 wireless is coming out soon too, which will drop costs dramatically.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
My company just went with a new isp that apears to also be in Kansas City (dont know if they are in your area or not).
www.cogentco.com
100Mb for $1000/month
Full Fiber Network
http://www.nuvox.com is a CLEC that has a presnece in Little Rock. We have customers in the Little Rock area and have solutions available to customers such as yourself. We have different options available to you regarding this solution and would be happy to speak with you regarding this. I am in Little Rock and I am available for a discussion with you. Shoot me an email to discuss. gphillips@nuvox.com.
Why on earth do you think you need that much bandwidth? Where is the bandwidth going? Most smallish companies (the ones that balk at $800k) don't need more than a couple T1's.
If you REALLY need that kind of bandwidth, take a long look at co-lo'ing your servers somewhere. You can get the bandwidth relativly cheeply, and house all the high bandwidth stuff at the co-lo. Then you just remotely manage it. Have some way to do send large batches of data to the colo (say large capacity tape drive, or maybe some ATA drive array) and you're done.
Zapman
I guess the frozen yogurt market has some stiff competition these days, eh?
Method of processing duck feet
For $800k, it might just be cheaper to move your operation across town.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
Move 45 miles...
They want that bandwidth between their two sites... so they can have a remote hot backup.
Need a Catering Connection
Give me a break man, I mispelled one word.
Man when did english dweebs start hitting slashdot? And what does spelling have to do with keeping a network up and running?
Good grief ACs if you are not worth you claiming then they are not worth reading.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Good lord, man. He was trolling. Why waste your time to give some fifteen-year-old his jollies?
May we never see th
If the *only* high-bandwidth needs are for hot-backup, you may be able to, use colo or perhaps, cut a deal with another company's offices (one that could be reached more cheaply with high bandwidth) that also wants to run off-site hot-backup systems -- you supply hot-backup systems for them, they supply some for you. I don't know whether this is standard business practice.
May we never see th
To top it off it appears to just be a typo rather than a blatant mispelling.
The meme police, They live inside of my head
why exactly are the readers of slashdot doing your consulting and due-diligence work for you?
quit reading slashdot and get back to work!
From the little bit you've told us, I am guessing that you're throwing bandwidth at your issues and haven't put any effort into the bigger issue of optimizing your networks.
The first thing I would do is look into centralizing your applications and change the delivery methods. Why have these piggy SQL server calls traversing the network? If you can't get the frontend converted from SQL native to a web-based system, then at least consider going to terminal services for that app.
Free the West Memphis Three!
Have you checked to see if there is any unused municipal dark fiber?
In some areas there may be fiber owned by the city/state/county that is not being used.
It might be possible to get the rights to some of that fiber if your company has any relationship with the local govt... If not, a good alternative might be to dedicate a vlan and ports on your switch to have for example a library located at each location interconnected. You essentially would be providing the backbone hardware for the library / local city office...
--
Time is on my side
People, yes ds3's go over copper but your fogetting 1 thing (400 feet) thats it. You bring in a ds3 either over an Async box or Transport System (sonet).
As for mux'ng ds1's into 1 ds3, the break even point is approx 4 ds1's.
PS: there is a differnce between ds1 and t1.
t1 = physical interface specs
ds1 = signaling speed
Now stop the abuse of the telecom vocabulary.
hf--
04.ds6.44
Why doesnt someone break that down.
Don't feed the trolls.
:-)
An alternative might be to aggregate the required bandwidth using available connectivity (DSL, business cable internet, T1, lower-speed point-to-point links). Depending on local costs, this may not be cost prohibitive.
As a side benefit, since your connectivity will be diverse, individual carrier and facility outages will only degrade your connection, not sever it.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
You actually expect the City of LR to own *any* fiber??? They're still relying on mostly dialup connections.
I'm the network admin for a city govt in Texas, we're using the Proxim Tsunami "QuickBridge" 5.8GHz wireless gear for several links and they work rock-solid. Only a few thousand $ per each pair of transceivers. The biggest expense would be getting towers so you'd have line-of-sight. We were able to simply use bujilding rooftops for most sites since our part of Texas is flat as a pancake and line-of-sight is generally not a problem, but at one site we did have to install an 80-foot tall tower.
QuickBridge will get you from 18Mbps to 100Mbps depending on how much you want to spend.
If all you need is for remote backup and basic data exchange, you should split up the problem. For backup, have local backup that can then perform remote backup during the day. You get exceptional speed for local backup, then more time for the remote backup. A couple of T1's MUXed together should work.
Mike www.sharecube.com