Bouncing back to broadband

Once-burned customers are overcoming their concerns about launching new broadband services.

Four years ago, ABM Industries, a $1.8 billion building services company, decided to switch from a solid, dependable, managed frame relay network to DSL connections from a variety of service providers. The goal was to lower the cost of linking branch offices to corporate headquarters.

"A lot of vendors and service providers who are no longer in existence wanted to get rid of our frame relay network. They said that using a VPN with DSL would be a great way to go," says Barry Wilson, manager of video, voice and e-learning for the San Francisco company.

But from the start, there were latency and other service problems. "Before long, we had angry branch managers. There was almost a revolution," he says. The final straw came in late 2001 when service from one DSL provider disappeared for good. "NorthPoint folded one night and left us with 20 offices with no service," Wilson says.

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Four years ago, ABM Industries, a $1.8 billion building services company, decided to switch from a solid, dependable, managed frame relay network to DSL connections from a variety of service providers. The goal was to lower the cost of linking branch offices to corporate headquarters.

"A lot of vendors and service providers who are no longer in existence wanted to get rid of our frame relay network. They said that using a VPN with DSL would be a great way to go," says Barry Wilson, manager of video, voice and e-learning for the San Francisco company.

But from the start, there were latency and other service problems. "Before long, we had angry branch managers. There was almost a revolution," he says. The final straw came in late 2001 when service from one DSL provider disappeared for good. "NorthPoint folded one night and left us with 20 offices with no service," Wilson says.

The IT staff scrambled and provided dial-up connections to the branch offices that used NorthPoint. Shortly thereafter, ABM switched all its branch offices back to a managed service from one vendor - AT&T's enhanced DSL service, which provides a Covad Communications  DSL connection to AT&T's frame relay network.

Like ABM, many companies burned by the well-publicized bankruptcies of service providers and metropolitan Ethernet players became leery about deploying new broadband  services. But after spending a year trying to do videoconferencing internally and not being happy with the results, ABM bit the bullet and successfully contracted with an application service provider.

Today, ABM uses Covad symmetric DSL connections to Wire One's Glowpoint  network for group videoconferencing. Wilson says that most of the time the video and audio quality is like watching TV, although there is occasional audio delay when connecting multiple sites.

And ABM isn't the only company that has overcome its concerns about broadband. Alyeska Pipeline, which runs the Alaska Pipeline, plans to spend about $3 million this summer to upgrade nearly 1,500 desktops to support multimedia. The upgrade will include speakers, Windows XP, the current version of Microsoft Media Player, processor speeds of at least 1.4GHz and minimum memory of 512M bytes. The company also is upgrading its 20 multimedia rooms with state-of-the-art videoconferencing systems and IP/TV, Cisco's  streaming solution that uses multicast to efficiently distribute video traffic on the network.

Because Alyeska operates several remote pump stations in an isolated, weather-challenged environment, travel for meetings, training or even healthcare is difficult. Therefore, the company uses its private ATM  network for distance learning, tele-medicine and meetings.

The upgrades will let Alyeska simultaneously stream live training sessions to the multimedia rooms, so employees won't spend so much time in cars and on airplanes. Ultimately, Alyeska is looking to bring IP/TV to the desktop.

Alyeska's available bandwidth of eight DS-3s is far greater than the three DS-3s currently used, "but new capabilities will absorb that bandwidth," says Erv Barnes, CIO of Alyeska. "People can never get enough of any infrastructure that will let them communicate."

If you're thinking about rolling out a new broadband service, here's an analysis of the various options.