U.S. Bancorp wanted a two-for-one deal when it came to signing a new network services contract: improved reliability and lower costs. The Minneapolis-based financial services firm ended up choosing the QWave optical wavelength private-line service from Qwest Communications.

U.S. Bancorp signed a five-year, multimillion-dollar deal with Qwest for QWave, which uses dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technology at speeds up to 10 gigabits per second.

U.S. Bancorp will use QWave to link its five primary locations in a network that spans 13,000 miles from coast to coast. U.S. Bancorp recently purchased Lucent’s metro optical networking products, controller software and resilient packet ring cards to create a carrier-grade backbone network using the QWave service. The firm’s optical network supports 48,000 employees.

"Previously, we were purchasing OC-3 circuits from various carriers, and on a per-unit cost comparison it was becoming very expensive," says David Grabski, senior vice president of network services for U.S. Bancorp. "We were looking for a more cost-efficient system."

U.S. Bancorp put out a request for information about its network services deal in the third quarter of last year, and a half dozen network services vendors bid on it. Qwest’s winning bid features a network design with two concentric OC-48 rings.

"We selected Qwest because of the ease of doing business with them, their price and the QoS," Grabski says.

U.S. Bancorp transitioned to the Qwest service three months ago, and so far the company’s IT staff is happy with it. Grabski says the biggest benefit of the service is that it now has a self-healing network that features resilient packet switching.

"We did have an outage three or four weeks after implementation, and the system healed itself," Grabski says. "Some data transmissions that we were doing for data replication didn’t notice that there was a failure. With our OC-3 circuits, that process would have required manual intervention."

At the same time, U.S. Bancorp is saving around 30% of the cost of its monthly fees with Qwest compared to the previous multicarrier arrangement.

"I sleep better at night. This is one less management concern that I have," Grabski says of the firm’s new network.

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