Telecoms eye continuity

ACCOUNTING SCANDALS and bankruptcies may have brought the telecom industry to its knees, but the unforgettable events of Sept. 11 dealt one of the initial blows. Not only were the carriers themselves shaken, but customers of data and telecom services were as well.

In response, enterprises have seriously re-evaluated many of their telecom strategies -- namely disaster recovery and business continuity planning to ensure uninterrupted access to services in case of an outage or other event that may knock down a company's network.

"The network is the linchpin of any business continuity strategy," says Joe Wienman, AT&T business services group's director of strategy.

According to a report Digital Research prepared for AT&T, 73 percent of those working in a company of 100 employees or more said their organization had reviewed its business continuity plan to determine its adequacy.

Fieldglass, a Chicago-based developer of software that assists in the procurement of part-time employees, was one of many companies that did just that, focusing in part on its telecom plans.

Not being able to reach its call center for several days after Sept. 11, due to its location next to the Sears Tower, provided the impetus for Fieldglass to purchase an IP-based PBX to reroute calls digitally.

According to CTO Sean Chou, aside from the change to the telephone system, the company also became multihomed, a term used to describe a business using two or more ISPs to ensure online access at all times. Chou also notes that Fieldglass is also considering bringing in AT&T as a third ISP, to further ensure around-the-clock uptime.

"The word redundancy sums it up," Chou says. "Many companies talked about having business continuity plans, but many never knew if theirs would work until they tested after Sept. 11," he adds.

Fieldglass also began working with Iron Mountain to provide real-time data mirroring to a secondary datacenter, leading Fieldglass to sign up for more bandwidth from its carriers. And the company is not alone: According to AT&T's Wineman, a growing number of enterprises, namely financial service companies, leased additional dedicated lines from AT&T to mirror data in real time.

Carriers also saw growth in conferencing: Many reported that immediately following Sept. 11, interest and uptake in audio-and videoconferencing services grew significantly as companies halted travel or employees expressed their desire to travel less.

But telecom carriers are quick to point out that it is difficult to gauge how much true impact Sept. 11 had on demand for new services, as many of the offerings, including VOIP (voice over IP) and VPNs, are by and large new services anyway and were already expanding their reach.