Ordering a Circuit Without a Local Loop

If your business provides calling card services or telemarkets customers by leaving a prerecorded sales pitch that sounds like a personal message on people’s answering machines, you’re a great candidate for a direct connection into your long-distance network. The greatest portion of the monthly recurring charge on a local loop is the mileage fee. To reduce the cost, you can try to find a POP closer to your office, or you can move your office closer to the POP. The ultimate cost saver would be to move your office into the same building as your carrier so you don’t have to pay for any mileage.

You don’t need to move all of your staff into your carrier’s POP — just your phone system. As long as you can access your hardware remotely through either an Internet connection or a simple modem dialup, and your business model can support this scenario, you can save money every month in local loop fees. Maybe once every few months you’ll need to visit your phone system to give it a software upgrade or some maintenance, but as long as you don’t need to have access to it every day, this is a great option. Fortunately for you, there is an entire industry created to help you.

Introducing the carrier hotel

Every large, metropolitan area has a carrier hotel that houses POPs and COs for almost all carriers, both long-distance and local. These buildings are meeting centers for telecom connections; hundreds of thousands of inter-carrier connections are made in them. Larger cities have several smaller carrier hotels in close proximity to the established primary building. The carrier hotels not only house carriers, they also are the home of collocation companies (also called colo providers), which exist only to give cheap carrier access to companies like yours.

 Remember  It isn’t a good business decision to rent out an entire suite in a carrier hotel. You don’t need all the space and you will still have to run cables to the floor of your carrier, build a temperature-regulated server room, and install security measures so people can’t access your hardware. In the end, all you need is about 9 feet of rack space and some electricity, not 800 square feet and a key to the washroom. The colo provider’s job is to provide electrical power and enough floor space in their suite to install your hardware. The colo provider probably provides you with either a secure cage or cabinet for your hardware. This is the bare minimum that colo providers offer. Some may provide maintenance contracts for your hardware, cabling service to connect you to your carrier, and varying levels of climate control and battery backup for whatever you install.

 Tip  If you are planning on moving your phone system to a carrier hotel, think nationally and factor in your rates and the taxes. A colo provider in Alabama may have a better rate and the same access to your carrier that a carrier hotel in Las Vegas offers. If most of your calls don’t terminate in Alabama, you could save a lot of money as you are now charged an interstate rate that is generally cheaper. You may also look at the tax rates assessed in different states. The state tax on a colo space in Las Vegas, Nevada, is considerably less than on a colo space in Los Angeles, California.

Selecting a colo provider

After you settle on the carrier hotel to which you want to move your telecom hardware, you need to find a colo provider in the carrier hotel that will house the hardware. If you haven’t been working in telecom at that specific carrier hotel, you probably don’t have any idea which colo provider is the best. There are two resources that can help you with this quest: your hardware vendor and your long-distance carrier.

Your hardware vendor may have worked in the building before and has contact with specific colo providers. If the rep from your vendor doesn’t know of a colo provider there, perhaps you can ask the rep for referrals from other vendors. If you are using a carrier hotel outside your state, your hardware vendor might not have any leads for you. Before you turn to the Internet and begin searching for colo providers, you should call your long-distance carrier, who can also provide some referrals from its technicians who work at the carrier hotel. A preexisting relationship between your carrier and the colo provider makes the move that much smoother.

 Remember  Every colo provider doesn’t have direct access to every long-distance and local carrier. Some may specialize in connections to MCI and Broadwing only, or a handful of local carriers. If you were referred to a company by anyone other than your long-distance carrier, confirm that the colo provider can connect you to the right network.

Colo providers have a variety of charges they can assess to you, aside from rack space and power. You will see fees for any maintenance or troubleshooting that you want the provider to perform. Generally, the fee increases for after-hours service, so the midnight installation you have planned on Saturday (to keep your business running seamlessly) will cost twice as much as it would if you did it at noon during a business day. Of course, if you lose three times as much business because your system is down in the middle of a busy workday, you may be more than happy to pay the increased fee for afterhours work. Check the complete list of charges for all of your prospective colo providers before you decide on one.

Ordering the cross-connect

A cross-connect is the wiring that joins one carrier to another. If you are located with a colo provider in the same carrier hotel that your long-distance carrier provided CFA for, you don’t have a traditional local loop spanning between your multiplexer and the switch of your long-distance carrier. All you have
to worry about is having the cross-connect installed. The process for ordering a circuit without a local loop is almost identical to ordering a circuit with a customer-provided loop (see “Ordering a Customer-Provided Loop Circuit,” earlier in this chapter). The main difference is that instead of passing CFA information to a local carrier, you send it to your colo provider.

 Remember  Your long-distance carrier still needs to give you a CFA that references a section of their hardware allocated for your local carrier. If your colo provider provides the cross-connect, you may not be allowed access to the main suite of your long-distance carrier, and the connection has to be made in a meet-me room in the building. If the CFA provided was on the tenth floor of your long-distance carrier’s POP, and now must move to the fourth floor meet-me room, you may see some challenges. The cost of the cross-connect fee may be more for a meet-me room than it is in the long-distance carrier’s suite. You may experience a delay while the circuit is being designed with a new CFA on the fourth floor. This effort may all be for nothing in the end because your long-distance carrier may not have the CFA at the circuit level you require. You may need a pair of T-1s, but your carrier can only provide DS-3 or OC-3 connections.

Because colo providers are smaller than local carriers, they can usually act on your CFA and return a design layout record (DLR) in about 24 to 48 hours. That’s a pretty short time frame when you consider that a larger local carrier can take weeks to dispatch a technician to your building to install the circuit. If you have a long-standing relationship with the people who establish orders at your long-distance carrier, you might be able to install a dedicated circuit to a colo provider in as little as two weeks.

Understanding the zero-mile loop

The entry points to a carrier’s network are very specific. Instead of going by the street address of the building, the entry point is narrowed down by the floor and suite within the building. For example, if your colo provider (on the 2nd floor) doesn’t have access to your carrier (on the 13th floor), someone is going to pull cable 11 floors and into the suites. Your carrier can run the wiring for you. All you have to do is ask for CFA on the second floor in your colo provider’s suite. Because your carrier is coming to the colo provider, and not the other way around, the carrier charges you an installation fee and a monthly maintenance fee, just as if it were pulling cable to a building across the street or 10 miles away. When cable is installed within such a small space, it’s called a zero-mile loop. A zero-mile loop is a local loop that doesn’t leave the building.

 Tip  If you set up a zero-mile loop, I recommend that you ask for a CFA from your carrier and pay your colo provider to run the cabling; this option is generally cheaper and quicker.