APPROVED

March 9, 1999

IHETS Board Room
714 N. Senate Avenue
Indianapolis, IN

Present:Elaine Patton-Bennington, Ivy Tech State College, Wayne Bohm, University of Southern Indiana, Fred Nay, Ball State University, Ellen Watson, Chair, Indiana State University

IHETS Staff: Tim Fisher, Max Gordon, Betty Hart, Dave King, Tim Ping, Mark Rottler, Susan Scott, Ed Tully

Chair Ellen Watson called the meeting to order at 1:30 p.m.

Approval of minutes

The minutes were approved as submitted.

Report on meeting with VP McRobbie on Abilene Project

Tully asked Ellen Watson and Dave King to report on a meeting they attended with VP Michael McRobbie on the Abileen Project and Internet2. Approval was promised to take on this project. Most institutions do not need the Access Indiana State Backbone, but Purdue and Indiana Univeristy need the backbone now.

The following is a summary of the terms of the contract agreed to last week, after 12 months of negotitations with AADS .

The Intelenet Commission, supported by IHETS, has also reached an agreement with AT&T. This contract has many facets.

The Intelenet Commission, supported by IHETS, has also reached an agreement with AT&T. This contract has many facets. To better understand this contract arrangement, please consider the backbone to be divided into four distinct parts: integration services, backbone services, access services and billing.

At the present time, IHETS performs three of the four services; integration, backbone and access. However, the Intelenet Commission, for various and acceptable reasons, not the least of which is USF and political considerations, does not want IHETS to continue in the access services. One year ago, Intelenet issued an RFP to seek another provider besides Sprint and AADS to offer access services to the backbone directly to the end user. TCG was the only respondent to the RFP. Thus a subcontract has been awarded to AT&T to provide access services as a PTP.

IURC and a State Universal Service Fund

Tully discussed a meeting he attended in March with Rick Doyle, an attorney for Intelenet and Marv Bailey were in attendance. The first issue addressed is identifying ways to provide USF funding to K12 schools and libraries.  We have 4 million total dollars and 2 million 2^nd issues for Indiana Higher Education has not received the money, but some funds are available. A report will be available in June or July, as soon as Tully receives a copy, he will make this available to everyone. July will be the next scheduled meeting date. The Universal Service Fund is in place. Tully suggested extending an invitation to Jerry Sullivan of Intelenet, and Attorney Rick Doyle for the Commission for Higher Education to the meeting in June.

Access Indiana State Backbone Video to advertise the backbone

Tully announced that the Access Indiana State Backbone video has arrived. Carol Brunty along with other IHETS staff have created a video showing the functions and the capabilities of the state backbone. It is less than 5 minutes in length.

Ameritech Agreement

Tully opened with a report on the progress with AADS, saying there is an existing contract between 

Ameritech Advanced Data Services and the Intelenet Commission in which AADS was contracted to be a Preferred Transport provider for the development of the Access Indiana State Backbone. This was a five year contract, signed in June 1995, and runs through June of 2000.

IHETS Move

King announced that the lease has been signed for the Science and Technology Building at 714 North Senate Avenue on the canal. A tentative move date of June or July is scheduled. We will no longer have to cope with leaks in the roof and will be moving only 4 - 5 blocks away. A large portion of our budget has been allocated towards this move with no downtime.

Action Items:

Pricing issue on Tl’s to the backbone

King discussed the recommendation along with the rationale to raise the annual cost of a T1. Tully briefed everyone on last years price schedule and shared that IHETS has subsidized at the following rates: the institution pays $7,000 per year and IHETS pays $9,500 per year. Some institutions are now deploying multiple Tl’s, last year the ITC decided on the following temporary basis: the first T1 to the institution would be price at $7,000; the second at $12,000 and the third and over three at $16,500. If a second T1 for video was deployed, the price for that second T1 would be reduced to $9,000 from the $12,000 agreed to. We are now suggesting: The legislature’s allocated budget will provide IHETS $730,000 for connections to the backbone for 1999-2000 and $521,000 to support video connections. Currently we have 58 Tl’s, and 7 56k’s in place.

The two unanswered questions are

1) should we support all Tl connections at $9,500 rate?

2) Should we limit the number of total number of connections to 131, regardless of the number requested?

After much discussion it was decided that Higher Education users would pay $8250 - $9000. The IHETS budget for the year is 1.2 million. IHETS staff made a recommendation that all T1’s be $7,000. Currently there are 50 T1’s in the Que, with half of them being funded now. Much discussion followed on what the cost ramifications would be to the institutions. This will be reviewed at the end of the calendar year, with an option increase. NOTE: consider/review with institutions $9000 go into next January from $7,000-9,000. The cost for a 2^nd T1 will now cost $7,000, and $9,000 for video.

Fred Nay suggested a review in the future and re-adjusts the price at the end of every year if needed. King made a suggestion that this be reviewed in six months. In the very near future, Rottler will be sending to all technical contacts at each site a letter requesting their anticipated needs for the coming year. Implementation in demark, not discussed this could be new fiscal year. Currently the budget is over spent by $382,000. Tully said that we could absorb this expense for now. Effective July 1, we are recommending to the Management committee on a semi basis, a cost meeting breakeven on all Tl’s at $7000 each.

The total amount of 1.3 million dollars. Bennington asked what a future video Tl would cost for Ivy Tech at the end of this fiscal year. It was suggested that on January 1, 2000 that this be brought before the ITC for a vote. Beginning this fiscal year continue as is. Bennington and Nay commented that they are in agreement with this statement. Watson and King will present this to the Management Committee on March 23rd. 

Migrating SUVON to Access Indiana State Backbone

Gordon described the recommendation plan to move SUVON services to the AISB and use ATM compressed voice technology. SUVON would be established as a voice and Fax only network, with no guarantee to carry modem traffic. IHETS has been evaluating over ATM for the last several months. SUVON service for Butler University, Franklin College, University of Indianapolis, Marian College and Tri-State University were all migrated to voice over ATM with the move of SUVON from GTE-T1.

Service is going well. Some issues have arisen but were resolved. As with any new technology there was a learning curve to understand what could be done with ATM voice and what limitations existed. Voice quality is good. FAX traffic is supported but modem traffic will not pass at this time. Of the five campuses

being served, Tri-State is the only one, which noticed a problem with modem traffic. They worked around

the problem by reassigned ‘class of service’ on the stations needing to uses modems.

IHETS proposes to begin migrating all the SUVON locations to ATM voice during the next fifteen months. Availability of the ATM backbone connection, which can be shared for voice traffic helps, keeps costs down. Currently each school pays $40 per SUVON line. The plan is to have each T1 going to a school currently to surrender some of its bandwidth for carrying voice traffic. That will not be possible in some cases. We suggest that the $40 per line charge stay in place. IHETS will provide the required CPE to accomplish the interface at the campus. There are some SUVON locations that cannot be converted.

Purdue and Ball State are the next highest users on SUVON. Purdue is just now being built so there should be no problem adding ATM voice to the new IND.net circuit. Converting Ball State will result in cost savings if ATM voice can be piggybacked onto their existing IND.net connection.

Gordon suggested that a change in Policy be made with a recommendation from the ITC committee and then forwarded on to the Management committee that states part of the Ind.net circuit be used to handle voice traffic

Several of the IVTC campuses, which have installed the First Virtual Corporation ATM switch to support their 2-way video conferencing systems, are good candidates for ATM voice. There is unused bandwidth on these existing ATM connections which would allow for ATM voice traffic and have no impact of the campuses video service.

Gordon shared that Jeff Walker has been working with VTEL, a video conferencing company.

Fred Nay made a recommendation that we move forward with this recommendation.  This will be forwarded to the Management committee by Dave King and Ellen Watson. There were no objections to this change in policy.

The meeting adjourned at 2:45 p.m.

The next meeting is scheduled for April 13 in University Library, 1116.