Constructing a communications network that links 419 home-electronics stores in 41 states is no easy chore, but Best Buy says it has found a way to build that network and save money to boot.

Best Buy is deploying AT&T's Integrated Network Connection Service (INCS) that will combine the national chain's voice, video and data traffic over a single network. The company expects it will save up to 25% annually compared with what it spends now to support those stores using dedicated private lines.

"It's a cost-attractive solution for us. We call it an EVA: economical value-add," says Dave Kaercher, Best Buy's director of technology design and build, or "the bits and bytes guy," as he calls himself.

Because the service is fully managed by AT&T, Best Buy doesn't have to make investments in its network operation center for additional monitoring and maintenance. AT&T also provides the hardware, a Cisco 3660 Multiservice Platform, which it also manages.

"The single-box approach eliminates a huge capital investment, which directly reflects on my operational budget," he says.

What Kaercher may like best about the service is that he sees minimal upgrades in the next three to five years.

Best Buy was already an AT&T customer when it signed a three-year, multimillion-dollar contract with the carrier to deploy and manage this new WAN. INCS lets customers migrate voice and data traffic onto a single pipe, eliminating the need for multiple connections that are dedicated to specific services such as voice, frame relay or Internet access.

That is how Best Buy was supporting its stores before INCS: two T-1s at each site. One T-1 was dedicated to voice and the other to data. With INCS, each store will have two T-1s, but they are connected to a Cisco 3660 device that supports inverse multiplexing for ATM (IMA).

IMA multiplexes multiple T-1s so they appear and operate as one logical connection, Kaercher says. "That's the beauty of the solution."

The single connection lets Best Buy send traffic over one link as opposed to dedicating specific types of traffic to each connection. This also lets the customer borrow unused bandwidth when needed because the end-user hardware sees all the T-1s as one link.

In the past, INCS was limited to a single T-1. This "expanded version" as AT&T calls it, is expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter.

The service lets Best Buy increase bandwidth by adding a T-1 without the need for new hardware. The Cisco 3660 supports up to eight T-1s.

The retail chain is starting out with 2.6M bit/sec to each store with the ability to support up to 12M bit/sec. Best Buy will send all voice, data and video traffic, such as high-definition television content, to its stores across INCS.

The company is also demonstrating Internet gaming at its stores, which can eat up a lot of bandwidth. This is why Best Buy was not satisfied with AT&T's first INCS implementation, Kaercher says. The company needed more than 1.5M bit/sec at its stores.

No other provider is offering an integrated voice and data service that supports more than a T-1's 1.5M bit/sec to each site. Sprint offers its Integrated On-Demand Network service that supports voice and data over the same connection, but that service maxes out at a full T-1. And the service does not support dynamic bandwidth allocation.

Best Buy is about to test another feature that's new to the AT&T INCS service. The company will establish two permanent virtual circuits (PVC) over its bundled T-1 connections: one for Internet traffic using AT&T's network-based firewall service, and another to carry corporate data traffic.

The benefit of two PVCs is that customers can dedicate an amount of bandwidth to two types of traffic and still be able to borrow from those dedicated allotments when they are not in use. Borrowing bandwidth on the fly that is dedicated to specific traffic is called dynamic bandwidth allocation, which AT&T INCS has supported since its inception. But today AT&T INCS customers using the original service can only establish a single PVC.

AT&T has not determined if dual PVC support will be included in its expanded INCS introduction later this year.

Best Buy is still early in its INCS deployment with 17 stores supporting the service.

"Conservatively we will have 175 to 200 stores connected this year," Kaercher says. "The remainder will come online in 2002."

» posted by ITworld staff

Network World

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