Lasers over Manhattan: Deutsche Bank says 10-4 - infrared communications - Wireless/Mobile

The Date...Monday, Sept. 6, 1993. The Time: 8 a.m. The Place...hustling and bustling midtown Manhattan, the heart and soul of New York City.

The Situation...Two months from today, the trading firm of CJ Lawrence will be merging its network with Deutsche Bank's network. Trading floor departments will be shuffling between the two.

The Agenda...Provide seamless highspeed connectivity to CJ Lawrence from the existing Deutsche Bank network infrastructure. It is critical that response times from various network services appear to be that of a local connection, even if the service is in another building. Real time access to various market information services is the key to success.

The Location...Deutsche Bank's offices are directly across the street from CJ Lawrence's offices. Seems like an easy connection, right? But time is short, so you've contacted Teleport to provide a dedicated 10Mb/s link. You're planning to run at Ethernet speeds across the street. Great idea! The order is placed and you're starting the Level 5 cabling for the additional offices. Ungermann-Bass Access/One 10Base-T concentrators will be used, reporting back to the UB Net Director at your locale.

One Month Later...Electricians have completed the Level 5 cabling system. The Ungermann-Bass hubs are installed and the CJ Lawrence infrastructure is ready for prime time. However, Teleport has informed you that the installation is going to be one week late. You're getting a little nervous... (actually, that's an understatement!)

One Week Later...Three weeks before the move, Teleport has finally installed their equipment and you and your staff proceed with testing. But something's not right. The response/bandwidth falls short of expectations. The projected real time response is not even close. Why? You don't have time to figure out why. You need a solution now. What's a good network manager to do? The move is in three weeks. You were doing a good job. You're gonna get creamed on this one. A real nightmare! Not necessarily so...

If your name is Rafael Osso, AVP and chief network manager of Deutsche Bank, then at this point you're ready for some good advice and a good martini (shaken, not stirred, of course). Forgetting the martini for now, you're meeting with Mike Fink this afternoon. Mike is a managing partner and Director of Technical Services at Systron, a network integration firm and VAR based in New York. He has had considerable experience dealing with these types of situations in the past; he designed and implemented much of Chase Manhattan Bank's worldwide Corporate Finance network infrastructure.

Due to the nature of the business, much of Deutsche Bank's network design and implementation has to be done quickly to meet business requirements, Mike says. People and offices move at the drop of a hat.

After listening to Rafael's woes and the constrictive requirements of linking the two networks, Mike advised Rafael the answer could well be infrared laser beams in line-of-sight applications. Not the fluorescent whooshes of sci-fi stuff which cuts something or someone in half, but fine beams that are almost invisible to the naked eye. Rafael had been presented this option by his telecomm manager, Jim McConville, when planning for this project had started. At the time, the Teleport option seemed the more down-to-earth solution for a trading floor. A laser was a little far-fetched, a Flash Gordon sort of thing. Rafael thought that maybe Mike had some of those martinis before the meeting.

But time was tight and Rafael was intrigued by the idea of communications between two trading floors on a beam of light, so Mike pursued the idea. As it turned out, the computer room at Deutsche Bank, located on the eighth floor of the building, was directly across the street from CJ Lawrence on the 12th floor. The two offices faced each other, separated 300 feet by West 52nd Street, on a 30-degree elevation. Complicating things a bit were the coated glass windows at Deutsche Bank, to prevent sun glare. No problem, Mike thought--a laser would still work without a hitch!

Mike contacted Laser Communications Inc. (LCI), based in Lancaster, Pa. LCI thought Mike's plan was good and referred Mike to Traxonics, LCI's metropolitan area service provider. Traxonics sent an engineer to meet Mike and perform an optical site survey. That survey proved Mike correct. Rafael immediately ordered three LCI lasers equipped with on-board 10 Base-T transceivers: two laser units for production and one as a stand-by unit. (Token ring units were also available.)

The laser was in the works, but Rafael was hedging his bets. What if the laser was a bust, too? He put together a SWAT team of Jim McConville, Mike Bowles (a consultant with Ungermann-Bass) and Tom Galvin (a Systron senior systems engineer). Their Objective: Fix the Teleport connection.

Two weeks before the move...The lasers arrived and Traxonics came in and mounted the units to the concrete pillars inside the buildings. Rafael's crew ran fiber patch cables from their Ungermann-Bass 10Base-T Access/One units to the lasers. Traxonics adjusted the light beams and--even with the coated glass--the units registered 100% connectivity and full 10Mb/s bandwidth.

The new segment was attached to a Novell MPR port (Novell Multi-Protocol Router). The Novell MPR is the hardware/software solution used to give Deutsche Bank backbone connectivity. Now for the real test: fire up a PC at CJ Lawrence, log in to the Deutsche Bank Novell application server, and cross your fingers...

Meanwhile...Rafael's SWAT team had a perplexing problem. Tests of the Teleport fiber showed a full 10Mb/s of bandwidth, so what could be the cause of the performance problem? It turned out to be several things. The buffered repeaters provided by Teleport at both ends of the single mode fiber were adding a few milliseconds delay to every packet. This was not a problem for most of the IP traffic. However, it was causing havoc with the IPX traffic, which requires acknowledgements for packets received before proceeding with a transmission. What to do?

After a few lively discussions of the options and frantic scrutiny of fiber specifications, a daring plan evolved. The lone strand of single mode fiber ran downtown under the streets of New York for a couple of miles to the Teleport station, where it was connected to another strand heading back uptown to Deutsche Bank. But what could be used to drive a signal reliably over that kind of distance with acceptable response times? FDDI?

The team made many phone calls that had most vendors chuckling and wishing them luck. At last they ordered two FDDI cards for their Wellfleet routers. Rafael was skeptical. Why wasn't anyone else using FDDI for WAN links in New York? The cost of the fiber was about double a T1 line. Was it possible to get 10,000% improvement in performance for so little? But could the deadline be reached in time? (The SWAT team was secretly rooting for the laser, too!)

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In a flash of infrared laser light, you were in! Rafael was overjoyed. Testing went extremely well. The move proceeded as scheduled and proved to be a tremendous learning experience. The laser worked very well.

Now, how about this maverick network Rafael's SWAT team had dreamt up? It didn't come together in time for the move, but the FDDI link was up and running smoothly a week later. So the laser had really saved the day. It paid for itself by avoiding the costs of delaying a trading floor move by a week.

A week later, Jim McConville started making calls to get another strand of single mode fiber. He wanted his FDDI to be a Dual Attached network. He called NYNEX, the telephone company for the area, and they assured him that his idea couldn't work.

As the sun sets slowly over the Hudson River, you leave your office and look back to the Deutsche Bank and CJ Lawrence offices. Here, in the center of Manhattan, you bring Flash Gordon-style technology into the world of high finance.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Nelson Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group