* Renovator Award winner uses optical Ethernet
A network overhaul that linked corporate locations with optical Ethernet, built in QoS for demanding new applications and swapped Centrex for VoIP earned PPL Corp. Network World’s top honors in the first-ever Renovator Award.
A network overhaul that linked corporate locations with optical Ethernet, built in QoS for demanding new applications and swapped Centrex for VoIP earned PPL Corp. Network World’s top honors in the first-ever Renovator Award.
Celebrated at an event during Interop in Las Vegas, PPL was one of three Renovator Award finalists, the others being the Saugus Union School District in California, and Psomas, a civil engineering company in Costa Mesa, Calif.
The awards, sponsored by Juniper Networks, were designed to recognize outstanding network projects, with entries screened by a panel of judges that consisted of Bob Brown, Network World executive news editor; Lee Doyle, group vice president at IDC; Daniel Golding, senior analyst at Burton Group; Johna Till Johnson, chief research officer of Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist; Jeff Wilson, a principal analyst at Infonetics; and Robert Whiteley, an analyst at Forrester Research.
PPL took home the gold because of the strides it has achieved in its five-year renovation plan and the compelling returns: The company has eliminated $1 million in costs and within two years expects further VoIP deployments to save another million per year.
Ranked 344 on the Fortune 500 with revenue of $5.8 billion, PPL is a multinational energy company based in Allentown, Pa., with 100 locations in Pennsylvania, Montana, Illinois and spots along the Eastern Seaboard.
David Stever, manager of communication technology services, says the company’s network supports some 11,000 nodes, and the centralized information services department provides IT services, including network and telecom, for all domestic subsidiaries and locations.
In the early 1990s, PPL linked 15 of its major Pennsylvania locations with a private SONET ring that the company built to monitor and control substations by stringing fiber along its power transmission towers.
“By the mid-90s, enough of the SONET was completed so we started to look at the ring as a way to eliminate carrier charges,” Stever says. “In 1997 we put an OC-3 ATM backbone on top of it.”
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