RAD Cost-Effectively Extends Ethernet Service Footprint of Central Oregon Service Provider

Quantum Communications is a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) serving the small cities and vast stretch of rural regions that comprise Central Oregon. With an installed fiber network connecting the city of Bend with the population centers of Redmond and Madras, Quantum provides businesses in these areas with everything from traditional TDM services to next-generation Ethernet and virtual private network (VPN) services.

While Quantum’s fiber network offers these services to the larger population centers, a key objective for Quantum was to provide out-of-network coverage for the surrounding, geographically dispersed regions not directly connected to their fiber network.

The answer to Quantum’s challenge was to leverage its extensive, existing TDM-based SONET network as transport for next-generation Ethernet services. After comparing RAD’s RICi-T1 with a selection of competitive products from other manufacturers, Quantum selected the RICi-T1 to carry out their objectives. “RAD’s RICi-T1 was chosen based on its feature set, as well as its attractive price,” states Patrick Cahill, Quantum’s Network Administrator. “When working with other vendors’ products in a bridging mode, they are not manageable in the way we need them to be” continues Cahill. “However, the RICi-T1 has the ability to transparently pass all the traffic, while still allowing us full remote control.”

The RICi-T1’s superior manageability greatly reduces Quantum’s maintenance costs and system downtime as they can troubleshoot network complications via an SNMP connection, a Web browser or Telnet from their central site. This enables them to manage customer located units remotely, saving expensive “truck rolls” for service visits.

The RICi-T1 also enables Quantum to offer service level agreements (SLAs) with differentiated QoS levels. With SLAs, Quantum can offer customers like Central Oregon’s multi-location regional hospital the high levels of QoS necessary to provide real-time reliability for critical applications, such as medical seminar videoconferencing or data transmission for centralized, remote patient monitoring. Meanwhile, businesses with less urgent data transmission needs, for applications like email and general Internet access, can subscribe to a less stringent and less expensive SLA.

Differentiated SLAs mean that each customer pays only according to their specific needs; not an averaged flat rate that overcharges some and undercharges others. Better still, as a customer’s data transmission needs change, so can their SLA…with just a few strokes of the keyboard. The RICi-T1 not only enables Quantum Communication to deliver leading-edge next-generation data communications throughout the rural Oregon service area, but also to attract and maintain customers with a range of competitive rates.