Four new POP switches being configured
We have completed installation of our new switches at five of our POPs (points-of-presence, i.e. towers or buildings that customers connect to). We have fourteen left to go and we’re doing four per week. This upgrade process is a massive undertaking and we’re trying to have everything done by the middle of summer. Here’s how we’re splitting it out:
Physical switch upgrades
We plan to have these done by the middle of March. This is a plug-and-play process, but it takes a lot of man-hours to prep the switches and visit all those sites in the middle of the night. We spent a lot of lab time perfecting our plan and the ones we’ve done so far have gone almost flawlessly, so we’re pretty happy with the process.
Upgrade to MPLS
Once all the switches are in place we will begin rolling out MPLS on customer transport circuits. This will be a customer-by-customer process that will take place over several days. We will schedule maintenance windows, but there should be very little customer impact. Once this process is completed all of our layer-2 transport services will use MPLS for encapsulation. I believe the initial change over to MPLS should be done by the middle of April
Microwave Backhaul Upgrades
I can’t decide if the switches or the backhauls are more exciting. I love the changes that the switches bring, but once we’re done with the backhaul upgrades we’ll be able to provide multi-hundred megabit connections to the majority of our network. You want a 200Mbps internet pipe in Wilsonville? OK, no problem. How ’bout a 300Mbps transport circuit from Newberg to Gresham? Done! We’ll be able to do it all on the backhauls that we’ll already have in place!
The backhaul upgrades require far more labor than the switches. Our tower crews have to hoist heavy antennas up the towers, run new cabling, aim the links, and then we finally have to integrate them into the network without causing any service disruptions. We’re experts at all of these things, but they take time. We aggressively plan to upgrade 3-5 backhauls per month and we hope to be done in August.
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