alltel invests in fiber for the long haul

By STEPHEN HARDY

Like many communications service providers, alltel Corp., Little Rock, AR, is in an expansion mode --in geographical territory and service portfolio. Besides managing the usual headaches associated with growth, the company faces the challenge of integrating its new offerings across a widening service area. To meet this requirement, alltel has announced its intention to spend approximately $40 million to construct and acquire 1400 mi of additional fiber-optic plant.

According to Bob McKuin, alltel`s vice president of network development, the company is looking to support its already strong presence in the southeastern United States and the Great Lakes region. The company has telephone properties in 14 states that represent 1.7 million access lines, primarily in rural and suburban areas. Besides its 6077 mi of existing fiber-optic infrastructure, the company also runs a cellular communications network supporting 800,000 subscribers, and has purchased more than 70 basic trading areas for personal communication services (pcs). The company is also expanding into the long-distance and Internet arenas.

"When you add all that up, it represents a lot of transport requirements between those nodes, which heretofore we have not been able to satisfy except through lease arrangements with other carriers," McKuin explains. The time has come, company executives decided, to invest in fiber-optic plant the company could own and control.

"When you work the business case and look at our growth and the opportunity to sell additional services in addition to satisfying our own transport requirements, it just makes good economic sense for us to do that," McKuin says.

While the new cabling will support both long-haul and local applications, McKuin says the emphasis will be on buttressing the company`s long-haul capabilities using Synchronous Optical Network (sonet) rings. McKuin says the company will acquire approximately 1200 mi of its total requirements through either direct purchases from companies building networks in its areas of interest or the laying of new cable in partnership with other communications firms. He expects the company will "go it alone" on the remaining 200 mi. The project should be completed by the year-end.

Some buildouts are already under way. For example, the company has joined with WorldCom Inc., Jackson, MS, to build a link from Little Rock to Memphis, TN. The company also plans to connect some of its properties in western Pennsylvania with others in northeastern Ohio, as well as link its recently completed Georgia backbone network with facilities in Florida (where a link with a sonet ring already exists), Arkansas, and the Carolinas.

The company is still evaluating both equipment and cable vendors. McKuin says the new links will initially run at OC-48 (2.5 Gbits/sec), an improvement over the OC-12 (622-Mbit/sec) and OC-3 (155-Mbit/sec) speeds present in most of the existing networks. alltel will continue its use of singlemode fiber, he says. The company is also con- sidering the use of non-zero dispersion- shifted fiber.

"There may be some sections where we`ll use WDM [wavelength-division multiplexing], where we are fiber-scarce in some of our existing plant, to be able to provide the connectivity," he adds. "But we aren`t expecting a significant deployment of that initially. Certainly we want to have the capability to go to that in the future, though, if growth materializes."

One of the primary goals for the new fiber-optic facilities is to support the company`s burgeoning pcs business. Markets such as Memphis and Jacksonville, FL, will be among the first to see fiber runs between pcs nodes.

"Our prime focus will be to provide interconnection between the major nodes so that we can handle our own long-distance traffic," McKuin states. "And we expect we`ll also be able to leverage our fiber to provide some transport from cell sites back to the host switch. But that`s secondary to the long-haul transport component."

Optical fiber may also help solve the problems of servicing users in remote locations. "We`re also actively evaluating alternatives of using [fiber] to support remote locations with switching--in other words, serve markets remotely with transport as a substitute for switching," McKuin says. q