KMC Telecom Saves $2 Million Per Year by Bringing Monitoring In House

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Why pay someone to do something you can do yourself? That was the question KMC Telecom, a fast-growing integrated provider of voice, data, and Internet services, asked itself in 2001. Until last year KMC relied on an outsource provider to monitor its fiber optic network, which stretches over 30,000 miles across 35 states. KMC decided it could save money by monitoring their network themselves. KMC created a highly successful network operations center in Huntsville, Ala. Since the Huntsville NOC began operation, KMC has saved substantially on operations costs while creating a real-time monitoring capability that proved itself during November's tornado strike.

In reliable hands: KMC Telecom"s team now has total control at their finger tips. They no longer have to pay for outsourced monitoring and are finding their response times to network outages have improved now that they can view alarm events in real-time.

KMC's move from outsourced to in-house monitoring was one more milestone in the telecom's growth from start-up to major-league CLEC. KMC had outsourced network monitoring since the foundation of its fiber optic network in the mid-1990s. The growth of the company and its network had by 2001 created a situation where it was both possible and necessary to use economies of scale to cut operational costs.

"We'd outsourced our monitoring since we deployed our facilities network," says Harold Moses, director of operations for KMC in Huntsville. "For most start-ups, it's not economical to do these things for yourself. But as the network grew, it became more and more practical for us to take monitoring in house. We're looking at cost savings and how to integrate costs."

Moses says that operating its own NOC has saved KMC millions. "We've cut the operational expenses significantly. The total project resulted in about $2 million a year in savings. The NetGuardian equipment was a part of that." The Huntsville NOC relies on the alarm collection capacity of DPS Telecom's NetGuardian. KMC has NetGuardians in 48 different locations across the United States, where they monitor the integrity of KMC's fiber optic network as well as environmental, power, and security alarms in KMC's numerous remote sites.

“DPS Telecom gives us a reliable way of accessing a variety of equipment, regardless of the brand or provider. We now have a common interface for our existing system.”

KMC has deployed 60 NetGuardians and 120 NetGuardian Expansions. This should give you some idea of the scope of KMC's operations; altogether, the Huntsville NOC monitors approximately 3,000 alarm points. Monitor data from the NetGuardians is sent as SNMP traps to the Huntsville NOC, where it is displayed using HP OpenView internet usage manager software. Moses says the decision to use the NetGuardian came from knowledge of the quality of older DPS Telecom products and research into current alarm monitoring offerings from a number of vendors. The deciding factor was that the NetGuardian gave KMC a cost-effective means of using its existing equipment.

"DPS Telecom gave us a reliable way of accessing a variety of equipment, regardless of the brand or provider. We now have a common interface for our existing system. We did quite a lot of research of what was available. We thought that the NetGuardian had a lot of flexibility, in terms of the various software options and terminal capacity," says Moses. According to Dale Stinson, manager of the Huntsville NOC, the NetGuardian was the solution that made the most sense for cost and capability.

"NetGuardian was the only solution that met both our technical and our budget needs," Stinson says. "The NetGuardian is tightly integrated with the way we work, in how it handles SNMP traps and its tight integration with HP OpenView." Monitoring the network in-house has also improved KMC's monitoring visibility in ways that are impossible to accomplish with a third-party provider, Stinson adds.

"It's really added to our peace of mind to be able to see what's going on real-time. Outsourced monitoring can't see problems in real time," Stinson says. The real-time monitoring capability was of great service on the morning of Nov. 11. Tornados had ripped through Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, knocking out the commercial power supply to several KMC Telecom sites. "Nine out of 10 of these sites are unmanned," says Stinson. "We have automatic backup generators, but we still need to send a technician to the site. It would have taken us several minutes longer to respond if we were still using outsourced monitoring. Being able to do real-time in-house monitoring probably shaved 30 minutes off our response time."