Buckeye Cablesystem sister company Telesystem said it has embarked on a network upgrade to achieve 99.999 percent availability for its IP-based services. Five-nines availability translates to no more than 5.26 minutes of downtime per rolling year.
Telesystem caters to commercial customers primarily in the Northwest/North Central, Ohio and Southeast, Michigan areas, providing services on a carrier-grade Metro Ethernet Network, including data and voice over IP (VoIP).
The upgrade will blend the features of modern high performance and high value Ethernet networking, with the resiliency of legacy analog-based systems. This will create a network that is capable of delivering IP-based data and VoIP services with an exceptionally high degree of availability and reliability, Telesystems said.
“Now more than ever, businesses large and small rely on Internet Protocol for their data and voice needs,” said John E. Martin, oresident, Telesystem. “Being connected 24/7 is vital in order to remain competitive. While traditional analog services have enjoyed Five Nines availability for decades, IP-based services have not enjoyed this same level of reliability. We recognized this need and have created a next generation network architecture that can couple the scalability of IP-based services with the reliability of traditional analog, even when unforeseen and uncontrollable circumstances occur. This network upgrade helps to show the commitment we’ve made to ensure the continued success of our customers and deliver a network that is unmatched by our competition.”
“We believe that the physical and logical redundancy innovations we’ve engineered are truly unique to the telecommunications industry,” said Doug Ward, director network operations, Telesystem. “During the design phase of this project we had to really push our equipment manufacturers, because no one else has attempted this yet for IP-based services. So, after an extensive period of research and experimentation, we successfully developed our own state-of-the-art design that relies on vendor-agnostic networking technologies and meets all of our stringent Five Nines requirements.”
Telesystem is a subsidiary of privately-owned Block Communications, whose other holdings include Buckeye CableSystem, the Toledo Blade, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette daily newspapers.
