Tales from the front: U.S. Bancorp chooses Qwest for reliability, low cost

U.S. Bancorp signs multimillion-dollar deal with Qwest for QWave

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.

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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.

Another benefit of the QWave service is that U.S. Bancorp network managers can do their own network provisioning on the fly instead of waiting for the carrier to do it. With the ability to provision its own services, U.S. Bancorp executives feel better about their disaster preparedness.

"On a quarterly basis, we go through disaster recovery exercises. Now we can do rapid redeployment of bandwidth, which makes this a lot easier," Grabski says.

Grabski advises other network managers to understand their business requirements and what problems they are trying to solve before going forward with a long-term network services contract like the one he just signed with Qwest.

"Find yourself great partners to work with," he adds. "When you don’t know something, ask lots of questions."

More about the Qwest deal here.

More about U.S. Bancorp’s Lucent equipment here.

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