Christmas comes early for Home Shopping net

By Jim Duffy
Network World, 12/07/98

St. Petersburg, Fla. - It's the holiday shopping season again, and with it comes a flood of calls to Home Shopping Network.

This year, the retailer is ready for those calls, thanks to an early Christmas present to itself: a high-speed, fully redundant Layer 3 switched Ethernet network connecting six virtual LANs.

The new network is part of a $5.5 million overhaul of the company's call center. The revamped call center is geared to handle more calls, speed customer response and generate more revenue. Home Shopping Network installed the network late in the summer, in time for the holiday rush.

"This is our busy season - the first of October to the end of January," says Roderick White, vice president of telecommunications. "We're really focused on keeping the business up and running, and making sure that we don't lose a call."

Losing calls was a problem with the company's old network, a shared-media routed FDDI backbone with direct terminal connections to a Unisys mainframe. A hiccup in some remote part of that network would be broadcast across the whole net, slowing performance, call response and order fulfillment. That cost the company money.

"We wanted to avoid problems such as having one chattering network interface card take our whole network down," said Joseph Piplica, director of network engineering at the company. "That happened on a couple of occasions."

With switched VLANs, the company also wanted to contain broadcast storms and keep them from affecting the whole call center network, Piplica says.

With these issues in mind, the company solicited bids from major internetworking vendors. 3Com was selected over Cisco, Bay Networks and Cabletron, which was Home Shopping Network's incumbent vendor.

Bay was eliminated early because White knew the company was "on the block." Bay was acquired by Nortel Networks in June. Cabletron was the next to get bumped because it was having financial difficulties, and White was concerned about the company's longevity. "Are you willing to bet your company's direction on them for five years? I'm not," White says.

That left 3Com and Cisco. Cisco pitched its Catalyst 5500 switch with the Route Switch Module. But 3Com "beat the dickens out of Cisco on price and functionality," White says.

The company's new call center network is based on 48 3Com SuperStack 1100 switches, two SuperStack 3900s, a CoreBuilder 9000 and a CoreBuilder 3500 Layer 3 switch.

Up to 1,200 call center agent workstations are connected to the 1100s via redundant switched 10M bit/sec links. The 1100s are connected to the CoreBuilder 9000 backbone switch over redundant 100M bit/sec Fast Ethernet pipes.

Home Shopping Network's server farm is attached to the 3900s over 10/100M bit/sec links, and the 3900s are connected back to the CoreBuilder 9000 over Fast Ethernet. Desktops and servers are configured into six VLANs based on sales geography, and the CoreBuilder 3500 routes among those VLANs over a Gigabit Ethernet link to the 9000 switch.

When a call comes into Home Shopping Network, an agent types in the order and payment information on a PC. The net transports this data to a Windows NT server, which authenticates the agent and lets him access a Unisys order processing mainframe.

The order data is then routed to a database on the mainframe, which approves the payment method and processes the sale.

The firm's network handles an average of 160,000 calls per day. On its heaviest day in September, it had 941,000 calls.

"We had to design a network and a system that will handle that kind of a load in 24 hours," White says. The company did that with the new 3Com network. "We want to answer every call within 25 seconds," he says.

By increasing response time, the network will increase Home Shopping Network's bottom line, he says. Cutting one second off of the average handle time of every call is worth $50,000, and the new net is reducing the average call handle time by more than 15%. "That's significant," White says. "What I care about is response time to the desktop because that half a second is important to me."

A new high-speed Layer 3 switched network lets Home Shopping Network handle more calls, thereby increasing revenue. The company uses 3Com's CoreBuilder 3500 Layer 3 switch to route traffic among six VLANs.