City of Burlington Uses RAD Equipment to Extend T1 Circuits over Fibre Optic Network

RAD's Optimux and FOMi Products Connect Voice to 34 Municipal Sites

• Application
• - T1 Extension over Fibre
• Challenge
• - To reduce expenses by replacing costly Centrex services with a municipality-owned T1 voice over fibre distribution solution
• - To extend voice over fibre to remote sites requiring one or more T1 lines without compromising voice quality or functionality
• Solution
• - RAD's Optimux-T3 and Optimux-4T1L fibre optic multiplexers and FOMi-E1/T1 fibre optic modems extend up to 28 T1 lines from each location to 34 remote sites over a fibre optic network.
• Benefits
• - Scalable T1-over-fibre transport
• - Central SNMP management
• - Cost-effective, compact, scalable solution
• - Enhances network uptime and reliability

Burlington Telecommunications serves the communications needs of the city of Burlington, Vermont. To eliminate the city's high monthly payments to its Centrex voice carrier, it decided to install its own fibre optic network for voice communications. "By building the fibre network, we've eliminated the need for a carrier to deliver our voice traffic to the city and we're saving well over $100,000 a year," says Chris Burns, Project Manager for the Burlington Telecom Project.

The City of Burlington searched for cost-effective and scalable access equipment that could distribute T1 circuits to all municipal locations. In addition, it wanted the solution to enable simple provisioning and monitoring of services after cutover to the new system.

Complete, Reliable Network

"We had to find a cost-effective way to distribute T1s to 34 different sites over a fibre optic infrastructure. We found RAD to be the only vendor offering solutions flexible and scalable enough to do this," Burns explains.

RAD's Optimux-4T1L units offered Burlington Telecom a simple and low cost way to transport four T1 circuits over a single fibre optic link. Burlington Telecom also deployed RAD's Optimux-T3 in a ring configuration to provide complete path protection that prevents service failure, even if a fibre link is damaged or disconnected. The Optimux-T3 multiplexes up to 28 T1 lines over a single T3 link. Burlington Telecom uses RAD's FOMi-E1/T1 when only a single T1 is needed for a particular location. RAD's LRS-24 SNMP-managed modem rack saves space in the central office.

The RAD products connect municipal buildings including fire, police, city hall, department of public works, power company, and parks and recreation facilities. With the fourth phase just completed, Burlington now has over 700 lines up and running at 11 school sites, five fire stations, one police dispatch station, three power company sites, three wastewater facilities, the water department and six other buildings.

Network Management Offers 24-Hour Surveillance and Remote Monitoring

The RADview SNMP management system lets Burlington Telecom manage the network from a central site, and also prepares them to meet the growing demand for high bandwidth services. Using RADview, Burlington Telecom can change the configuration, receive real-time alerts on system status, activate diagnostics and view statistics on system functionality in a graphical format. Remote management also eliminates the need for "expensive truck rolls," Burns points out. RADview enables full management of the LRS-24 and all remote units from a single station.

"We found RAD's solutions to be very attractive to us and offered many unique features, which played a key role in our decision to select them," states Burns. "We are especially excited about RADview since we were able to cut costs by integrating other-vendor solutions on the same platform."

Burlington Telecom plans to use RAD's IPmux solutions using RAD's TDMoIP® technology in future applications for integrating voice and data services for business customers.