May 19, 2005 Atlanta, GA -- BellSouth announced that it is providing 600 miles of fiber infrastructure to link the medical facilities of Baptist Health, a health care system based in Jacksonville, Florida, across a five-county area spanning northeast Florida and southern Georgia.

According to a press release, the infrastructure is composed of a fiber ring with paths to all of the system's hospital locations. BellSouth's SMARTRing service employs a multi-service provisioning platform (MSPP) to enable the system with standards-based, carrier-class transport capabilities.

According to the release, the carrier worked closely with the system's IT staff to ensure a smooth transition to the new service. Over the last three years, the carrier says it has evolved its underlying SONET infrastructure to a MSPP in order to improve network efficiencies, and to better support optical technologies.

By incorporating the MSPP into the system's access network, the carrier says it has enabled a network designed to allow future upgrades to be implemented without having to disrupt service, which alleviated the system's concerns regarding patient care. Additionally, according to the carrier, the network provides the system with the option to add its existing metro Ethernet traffic to the fiber ring.

The system says the network implementation is part of its strategy of investing in technology to help ensure patient care.