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Business Need

"The business need that we had was to create a disaster recovery network for our main location, where we have our company server where all of our remote locations access, and to also keep our main shipping locations online and in service in the event of some type of outage. We currently have a disaster recovery location out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Lansing, Michigan, so what we decided to do instead of having two separate T1s connecting our remote locations to each disaster recovery location, we decided to look into either a VPN or this MPLS any-to-any type IP network.

The consequences if we were to stay with our point-to-point T1 is we were pretty much locking down all of our remote locations to one site, which didn't take care of the disaster recovery and also would double our costs as far as needing additional services and making sure that our remote locations had alternate circuit routes in the event of a cut. Those kinds of issues come up for each location."

Why Qwest

"Number one, because of our relationship with Qwest; we've been with them for so long, and with the point-to-point T1s, they've always been extremely stable, and the same goes for the Internet solutions that we've used. We've had some routing issues with other carriers before, but we've never had that type of issue with Qwest; they've always seemed to be on top of that type of issue. And we've also dealt with the MASS group for customer service, and any time we've had an issue with T1s, those issues have been corrected quickly. So that was one reason we looked to them--we knew that they were a stable company.

One of the other reasons that we selected Qwest was the pricing was very competitive. Typically, they came in lower than most of the other vendors that we looked at, and we currently use ADTRAN NetVanta routers for our different services, and for them being an ADTRAN reseller, we can get those routers at a discounted price."

Customer Service

"Since putting in the MPLS, we have not had to call them once since the service has been installed. We have not had any outages to speak of. So far the MPLS network has been extremely stable with no IT issues to report. We've always had good customer service and technical support from Qwest over the years. The issues with Qwest that we've had previous mainly had to do with circuit cuts at the local carrier, and Qwest has always been very quick to get that resolved or at least get back to us with information telling us when that local carrier would have our issue corrected."