When a T1 strangles under the load, IP over optical offers bandwidth on demand in 1Mb increments
A law firm that counts some of the country's top high-tech companies as customers cannot afford to let bandwidth limitations place a stranglehold on its productivity.
Fenwick & West -- a Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm specializing in intellectual property protection and legal guidance on mergers and acquisitions for software companies and other high-tech clients -- found that it was quickly outgrowing the 1.5Mbps T1 line it used for connecting to the Internet and to its e-mail service.
The firm has roughly 650 employees spread over three locations, the bulk of which are in the Palo Alto office, with 50 people in an office in San Francisco and another 20 in Washington.
Although Fenwick & West's Washington location had its own frame-relay connection to the Internet, the San Francisco and Palo Alto offices shared one T1 line coming out of Palo Alto for all access to the Internet and e-mail.
According to Matthew Kesner, CIO at Fenwick & West, the firm's large number of high-tech clients put great weight on having a speedy data connection. This demand added to the heavy bandwidth required for daily tasks such as Internet-based research, e-mail correspondence, and bulky file transfers.
"Often our lawyers have to download prerelease products from software companies or download whole Web sites, often of our clients' competitors," Kesner says. "A lot of the work in research has to do with copying down sites, viewing video, and [listening to] audio."
The Palo Alto and San Francisco locations were doing all this over a single T1 line, and the firm had outgrown the connection and needed something more, Kesner says.
In addition, the firm was running into big problems because the ISP had limited the size of e-mail attachments to 5Mb. This meant that Fenwick & West had to set up alternative means for receiving large documents and files from clients and other colleagues.
"The limitation [on e-mail attachment size] was becoming an issue on a daily basis," Kesner says.
The firm was also expanding rapidly, finalizing plans to add 100 employees to the San Francisco office. Kesner knew they needed more bandwidth, but after talking to numerous telecommunications carriers, he was not satisfied with either the few options available or the steep prices.
"We talked to all the major telecom carriers. They suggested a DS3 or OC3 as the two options. It seemed like those two options were a huge step up in bandwidth -- much more than we needed," Kesner says.
Because the carriers that Fenwick & West contacted would not sell bandwidth in smaller increments, Kesner said the firm came very close to signing a contract with a major carrier for about $18,000 per month -- a huge increase from the $1,500 per month the firm was paying for a T1 line.
Then Kesner and his team stumbled upon San Francisco-based Yipes, one of an emerging breed of service providers that runs fiber directly to corporate offices to connect a company's LAN to the Internet and other LANs via an IP-over-optical network.
Yipes offers high-speed Internet access and LAN-to-LAN data connectivity between business locations using common Ethernet interfaces, which eliminates conversions between IP and telephony protocols. Unlike traditional telecommunications carriers, Yipes' regional network is based on IP, which means it is optimized for carrying data and can provision bandwidth in 1Mbps increments.
"They could bring fiber [to us] and bring in the bandwidth in the increments we wanted, starting at 10Mb, which was closer to what we needed," Kesner says.
In addition to providing more bandwidth at a dramatically lower cost, Yipes implemented its service for Fenwick & West within 10 days, which handily beat the estimates of traditional telcos that needed a minimum of 30 days to 60 days to set up service, Kesner says.
Yipes also gives Fenwick & West the ability to increase bandwidth, with 24 hours' notice, in 1Mbps increments all the way up to 1Gbps.
"Just last week we had to download 6[Gb] of game files, so we dialed up our access to do it and we dialed it down the following day," Kesner says. "And we don't have any limitation on the size of attachments to e-mails. That has been a big help."
The price tag has been much easier to swallow as well: A 10Mbps service from Yipes costs the law firm $6,000 per month. Typically, for any type of service there is a one-time installation fee of $1,000 dollars, which Yipes waives if it doesn't meet the deadline set with the customer. And Yipes also gives customers enforceable SLAs (service-level agreements).
In addition to Internet connectivity, Fenwick & West took advantage of another Yipes service that establishes a LAN-to-LAN virtual private network connection between multiple office locations. The Yipes service brought fiber to the firm's San Francisco office, with a 3Mbps Internet connection and a VPN link between the San Francisco and Palo Alto offices.
But the biggest benefit of all was something Kesner never expected.
"Because the latency is so low and the speed is so high, it is as if [the San Francisco office] is right on our LAN, like a floor in our Palo Alto office as opposed to a remote location on a WAN that is 30 miles away," Kesner says. "That was a surprise. We thought we were always going to be faced with limitations on a WAN."
Additionally, because Yipes uses an Ethernet network, Fenwick & West isn't stuck with added equipment costs and latency from converting Ethernet to telecom ATM gear. And the equipment needed to run Yipes' service doesn't take up much space, which is a nice benefit, according to Kesner.
"We have two 8-foot high, 19-inch racks in our cabinet where we have consolidated telephone lines onto fiber," Kesner says. "Yipes has been able to bring in the bandwidth with six 1.5-inch pieces of equipment the size of pizza boxes, and it comes out as an Ethernet jack that we just plug in to our switches. We are short on space, just like most IT departments, so the small amount of equipment brought in has been really helpful."
Kesner says that next year Fenwick & West hopes to invest in a new IP-based switch that will consolidate data and voice lines over their WAN. In the near future, the firm intends to contract with Yipes to bring a fiber connection with as much as 5Mbps of bandwidth to its Washington location.
"The lawyers from Washington saw how nice it was to work in San Francisco and they are saying they want that kind of service," Kesner says.
The speed and low latency has erased some everyday work frustrations at the firm, which makes for "some very happy lawyers," Kesner says.
"Lawyers don't get excited about many things, but they are excited about this," Kesner says.
Mathew Kesner, CIO at Fenwick and West, says other options were a huge step in bandwidth and cost, whereas Yipes' optical network offered incremental bandwidth increases and LAN-to-LAN connectivity.
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