IP Transit Case Study

King County, Washington

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The Technology Challenge

In 2012, King County, WA was faced with finding a high-capacity Internet connectivity solution when its partnership with the city of Seattle for the same came to an end.  King County residents, public services and officials depend on accurate data and always-on, always-fast connectivity to conduct day-to-day business and make decisions about county products and services.

King County was looking for an IP backbone that would allow them to increase the scalability of its Internet network and give them true 100 percent uptime coupled with impeccable connectivity to all local and global networks, thus ensuring the best access speeds to all of its end users, vendors and constituents. In addition to an extremely reliable network they were looking for a carrier that would build and manage it on their behalf through their 24x7x365 Network Operations Center.

The network needed to be geographically diverse, capable of providing enough bandwidth to meet today’s demands, and offer the capacity to scale as traffic grows.

Our Solution

We were able to provide multiple, fully redundant 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports to King County that were geographically dispersed within the greater Seattle region and completely fault tolerant. Working closely with King County network engineers, the HopOne team created a BGP network design that tied into multiple local and regional peering points, was flexible, highly scalable, offered the level of real-time diversity that was needed, and provided ultra-low latency access to all major and secondary local networks in addition to the major and secondary global ones.

According to Lori Dickneite, Network Services Manager for King County, “HopOne provided diverse connectivity in support of the underlying network with management and maintenance at the highest levels.” She indicated that King County’s network reliability, efficiency, protection, and dependability were extremely important considerations in their selection of an IP transit provider.

Benefits to King County

• High Availability
  Utilizing our performance-oriented and strategically-interconnected coast-to-coast IP backbone local Seattle metro area multiple IP PoPs, we provided King County with a 20 Gb/s burst capacity local Seattle area network that is truly diverse. That level of diversity combined with HopOne network protection switching ensures King County achieves maximum network availability and true, uncompromising 100% uptime, coupled with zero packet loss and ultra low latency, guaranteed.
• Rapid Response
  We were able to quickly (within days) turn-up the two redundant, geographically dispersed 10 GigE ports on our diverse and fully redundant network within King County’s aggressive time frame. In addition, our agile network design allows for additional bandwidth to be provisioned on-demand, in an extremely short interval (in real time).
• Scalable
  Our network engineers pre-planned the network to anticipate and facilitate smooth linear growth. This ensures that the customer can rapidly increase capacity as business needs dictate.
• Cost Effective
  Our IP network engineering design team was able to meet all of King County’s stringent requirements while still being a cost-effective solution.