Pegasus Solutions  

Business Need

"In January 2003, we moved into a new facility. We had two facilities in the metropolitan Phoenix area consolidated into a single brand new construction building, so we had some bandwidth needs higher than the standard company our size. Some of the reasons for expanding the capacity were basically the growth of the Internet, too. Our hospitality industry--we're in the hotel reservation business and we're a third-party provider to some of the large hotelier and travel websites; some of the common names you'd be familiar with. So our bandwidth for the Internet connectivity to a couple of vendors--we have more than one for resiliency as well, and we needed more and more bandwidth every 18 months. So having the fiber infrastructure made it easier to turn up the wick, as my boss likes to call it. Service levels are more and more involved with all of our contracts, be it the telecom providers to us, and we hold them to that, and of course our customers--our hoteliers and third-party websites--of course, they hold us to service level agreements as well."

Why Qwest

"Qwest has probably been, in our market or in most markets in the U.S. and the local exchange carrier, the incumbent, the original Ma Bell company. Qwest has the most infrastructure, has the most wiring centers and the most fiber. So when we were choosing a fiber infrastructure for our new facility, high-end data center, Qwest was the only choice. The other competitive local exchange carriers certainly have fiber and we had experience with them in the past. We had felt that in the year 2002 and 2001 when we were doing our contract for this product it came back to Qwest being the incumbent local exchange carrier. It was the products that they basically designed, had the most experience with, and their account team and their project managers all made the process. And the project was delivered on time, which was key for anybody, and especially us."

Customer Service

"Early on, in the first four or five months, we had some errors. We were losing some data and Qwest missed it. The alarming flag was not turned on initially. I believe there's a simple flag, for lack of a better word, to turn on or off once the service is in production. So that was somewhat painful. At first, we had a second data center, our old site here in town, and we had an OC3 between them as a hot backup site. We only did that for the first year as part of our migration from the old data center to the new. I think that OC3 was where the data was being lost. And of course, since it was a backup site, it wasn't in production or anything, but my key point, I would say, as part of the project plan post migration or post turn-up, is to ensure that the circuits are being proactively monitored.

When the circuit was found to be malfunctioning, we noticed it. We called in a ticket and once that happened, it was handled in a couple of hours if I recall correctly. With high capacity circuits, there's always better skill sets in the trouble resolution groups of the higher capacity circuits. Since that happened in I would say the middle of '03, I don't recall any trouble tickets since honestly."