Rochester, New York was once described as the optical Silicon Valley of the early twentieth century [1]. Kodak was the largest innovator, founded in 1880 by George Eastman, a local banker. More than a dozen other companies involved in optics or photography operated there, including Haloid (which later became Xerox), Rectigraph, and Bausch & Lomb, all of which made cameras, lenses, and photographic emulsions.
Another form of optical innovation came to Rochester, driven by a telephone company that sought to try new things and create better services for its customers. That going concern was Rochester Telephone, founded in the early days of the telephone industry. It started its life as an independent telco, not affiliated with the nationwide “Ma Bell” network. Rochester became the thirteenth largest telephone company and the largest one in the state of New York. Customers in 14 states were served up their local telephone service from Rochester Telephone.
Another form of optical innovation came to Rochester, driven by a telephone company that sought to try new things and create better services for its customers. That going concern was Rochester Telephone, founded in the early days of the telephone industry. It started its life as an independent telco, not affiliated with the nationwide “Ma Bell” network. Rochester became the thirteenth largest telephone company and the largest one in the state of New York. Customers in 14 states were served up their local telephone service from Rochester Telephone.
Rochester, which rebranded itself as Frontier Communications in 1995, aggressively deployed new technology, rooted in fiber optics, to bring the capacity and quality of service needed by its growing base of customers who were beginning to actively use the Internet during the mid-1990s.
Meeting with Frontier in the Early Days
Doug Juers left Nortel Networks in December 1998, in favor of a sales opportunity with Cerent. He recalls one of his more challenging sales calls with the Upstart Startup, “It was difficult because of a rarely called snowstorm emergency by Rochester Tel. That was saying something, since bad storms in Rochester are not uncommon.”
Doug recalls pulling the Cerent 454 [demo unit] through the snow and meeting Jim Watts on March 10, 1999 at 10:50am in the morning. He was impressed that Jim was hard at work, in spite of the stay-at-home warning, and Jim was no less impressed with Doug’s commitment to come in and show off Cerent’s wares.
“Jim Watts never came out to Petaluma for a visit,” Doug told me. “He bought the product, I’m sure, because of that initial meeting.”
Concurrent with Doug’s joining Cerent, Frontier announced in December 1998 the establishment of its high-speed “network express lane” on its Optronics Network [2] using Pirelli’s TeraMux Hyper-Dense wavelength division multiplexing system. The idea was to use this new equipment to link twenty of Frontier's busiest markets on gigabit fiber routes, a notion announced by the company’s CEO in June of that year. Frontier hoped to light up the Pirelli optics with Hitachi’s OC-192 optical transport system. At this time, Cerent wasn’t even on Frontier’s radar.
Doug “stormed the beaches” and immediately caught the attention of Jim Watts and his colleagues at Frontier [3]. From those early meetings in March to the start of Supercomm ’99 in June, the Cerent team outhustled its competitors and addressed a list of Frontier concerns, all of which were answered:
Doug Juers left Nortel Networks in December 1998, in favor of a sales opportunity with Cerent. He recalls one of his more challenging sales calls with the Upstart Startup, “It was difficult because of a rarely called snowstorm emergency by Rochester Tel. That was saying something, since bad storms in Rochester are not uncommon.”
Doug recalls pulling the Cerent 454 [demo unit] through the snow and meeting Jim Watts on March 10, 1999 at 10:50am in the morning. He was impressed that Jim was hard at work, in spite of the stay-at-home warning, and Jim was no less impressed with Doug’s commitment to come in and show off Cerent’s wares.
“Jim Watts never came out to Petaluma for a visit,” Doug told me. “He bought the product, I’m sure, because of that initial meeting.”
Concurrent with Doug’s joining Cerent, Frontier announced in December 1998 the establishment of its high-speed “network express lane” on its Optronics Network [2] using Pirelli’s TeraMux Hyper-Dense wavelength division multiplexing system. The idea was to use this new equipment to link twenty of Frontier's busiest markets on gigabit fiber routes, a notion announced by the company’s CEO in June of that year. Frontier hoped to light up the Pirelli optics with Hitachi’s OC-192 optical transport system. At this time, Cerent wasn’t even on Frontier’s radar.
Doug “stormed the beaches” and immediately caught the attention of Jim Watts and his colleagues at Frontier [3]. From those early meetings in March to the start of Supercomm ’99 in June, the Cerent team outhustled its competitors and addressed a list of Frontier concerns, all of which were answered:
- The role of the Cerent 454’s first product release as a DS3 feeder for Hitachi’s OC-192, a long haul product that did not provide DS3 drops on its own 10 Gb/s platform.
- Demonstrate optical interoperability with both the Pirelli DWDM product and also the Hitachi OC-192 offering, as well as legacy NEC OC-48 gear.
- The ability of the Cerent 454 to support incoming international traffic, including STM-x interfaces, a popular connection option for major long distance carriers such as AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and Global Crossing, to name a few.
- Enable a Cerent 454 ring configuration beyond the industry standard sixteen nodes and still meet the required failure mode switching times. Cerent anticipated such a need, in 1998, and was granted a patent in February 2002, allowing up to 256 nodes to be present on a single ring.
- Support connectivity with the Objective Systems Integrators (OSI) network management system used by Frontier’s operations personnel to manage their telecom infrastructure.
Three Million Dollar Order Received
“Frontier is flourishing in a fast-moving industry by building a more responsive network that serves the growing communications needs of our customers,” said Jim Watts, Director of Transport Engineering, at Frontier. “Traditional transport solutions are expensive and designed primarily for voice traffic. Today’s environment of rapid deregulation and rapid expansion of the Internet has created a host of new rules. We needed a platform that is cost-effective and would grow with us. The Cerent 454 is the only solution available today that is flexible enough to fit our needs.”
This quote was used in Cerent’s June 1999 press release announcing the twelve-month agreement in which Frontier would take $3 million dollars worth of Cerent 454 equipment. Frontier used much more than that over the years.
Carl Russo, Cerent’s president and chief executive officer, recognized the value of the receipt of such an order in legitimizing the company, an event that would ease the concerns of other major telephone companies using a startup for their infrastructure needs. In that same press release, Carl said, “Frontier has made a name for itself by listening to its customers; and we’re doing the same thing. Cerent has delivered the first evolutionary optical transport platform, the Cerent 454. We’ve introduced a simpler, more cost-effective optical transport solution that ships in hours or days. The Cerent 454 permits Frontier to instantly add and provision traffic, giving it a significant competitive advantage in this Internet age of surging bandwidth demands.”
This win was a big deal! It helped sustain the post-Supercomm’99 buzz for Cerent as the hottest property in the telecom universe.
Looking Back on the Frontier Experience
Doug reflects on winning the optical transport business for Cerent, “I was fairly confident at Nortel that I did a good job there. [At Cerent,] I had to take nothing and make something out of it. I had not done that before. I went to the IOCs and broke in with Rochester Tel, then went to the cable companies and won 6 of the 7 there, and then went over to AT&T and broke in there and made it the largest account within Cisco for 8 of the 10 years I worked there. It felt pretty good. It’s one of the best products I’ve sold to date.” Doug guessed, in 2013, during our interview, “There’s probably 50,000 or so ‘454’s out there.” He adds, “It’s just freakin’ amazing.”
Cerent alumni say, “Thank you, Rochester!”
[1] David Owen, in his 2004 book, Copies In Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine, described Rochester as a hub of optical innovation.
“Frontier is flourishing in a fast-moving industry by building a more responsive network that serves the growing communications needs of our customers,” said Jim Watts, Director of Transport Engineering, at Frontier. “Traditional transport solutions are expensive and designed primarily for voice traffic. Today’s environment of rapid deregulation and rapid expansion of the Internet has created a host of new rules. We needed a platform that is cost-effective and would grow with us. The Cerent 454 is the only solution available today that is flexible enough to fit our needs.”
This quote was used in Cerent’s June 1999 press release announcing the twelve-month agreement in which Frontier would take $3 million dollars worth of Cerent 454 equipment. Frontier used much more than that over the years.
Carl Russo, Cerent’s president and chief executive officer, recognized the value of the receipt of such an order in legitimizing the company, an event that would ease the concerns of other major telephone companies using a startup for their infrastructure needs. In that same press release, Carl said, “Frontier has made a name for itself by listening to its customers; and we’re doing the same thing. Cerent has delivered the first evolutionary optical transport platform, the Cerent 454. We’ve introduced a simpler, more cost-effective optical transport solution that ships in hours or days. The Cerent 454 permits Frontier to instantly add and provision traffic, giving it a significant competitive advantage in this Internet age of surging bandwidth demands.”
This win was a big deal! It helped sustain the post-Supercomm’99 buzz for Cerent as the hottest property in the telecom universe.
Looking Back on the Frontier Experience
Doug reflects on winning the optical transport business for Cerent, “I was fairly confident at Nortel that I did a good job there. [At Cerent,] I had to take nothing and make something out of it. I had not done that before. I went to the IOCs and broke in with Rochester Tel, then went to the cable companies and won 6 of the 7 there, and then went over to AT&T and broke in there and made it the largest account within Cisco for 8 of the 10 years I worked there. It felt pretty good. It’s one of the best products I’ve sold to date.” Doug guessed, in 2013, during our interview, “There’s probably 50,000 or so ‘454’s out there.” He adds, “It’s just freakin’ amazing.”
Cerent alumni say, “Thank you, Rochester!”
[1] David Owen, in his 2004 book, Copies In Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine, described Rochester as a hub of optical innovation.
[2] In June 1998, Frontier Communications, in a press release, touted its “Optronics” network, which is “designed to combine the most advanced fiber optic structure with state-of-the-art electronic equipment throughout its 13,000-mile network.” The notice continues, “The cornerstone of the ‘Optronics’ network is a technology called Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). With DWDM, Frontier's fully deployed network capacity will exceed by 286 times the combined average monthly usage of the major U.S. carriers. The system is economical and scaleable, thereby allowing Frontier to better meet customers' changing needs.” Joseph P. Clayton, president and chief executive officer of Frontier, said, “Our competitors may employ some of our advanced network ingredients. But Frontier expects to be the only provider that will have its whole communications structure in place in the fourth quarter. The Frontier network architecture introduces new concepts in communications called 'IP everywhere' and ‘liquid bandwidth.’” By August 1998, Frontier boasted that the company had lit more than two-thirds of its entire ring-based “Optronics” network, on schedule to complete its fourth quarter 1998 target. In another press release a company representative stated, “Simply put, Frontier's "liquid bandwidth" concept gives its business customers enormous flexibility in determining their bandwidth needs, allowing them to ‘burst’ into additional bandwidth when needed virtually on demand. Frontier will also provide customers with a Telecommunications Management Network-based set of applications that lets them track their usage, pay their bill, monitor their network, provision their bandwidth, and order other services on line via the Internet.”
[3] The key Frontier players who Doug Juers and his support team collaborated with during the first half of 1999, in order to highlight the power of the Cerent 454, included the following:
Jim Watts Director of Transmission Engineering
Carl Krentz Optical Transmission Engineer (Long Distance)
Gregg Palinski Manager, Transmission Engineering (Local Services)
Madan Shastri Optical Transmission Engineer (Long Distance)
Cory Tynon SONET Transmission Engineer (Local Services)
Shelby Jozwiak Sr. Operations Team Leader
Yvonne Brown Network Support Engineer
Duane Shaifer Manager of NOC
Pete Severts Director of NOC Operations
Mike Wormley Network Support Engineer
Charles Colbert SONET Manager
Dan Enright Sr. Vice President of Operations
Dave Keech Director of Engineering & Technology Planning (Local Services)
David Jorgensen Transmission Engineer (Local Services)
Tom Kramer Technology Manager
Tom Richardson Sr. Project Manager, Systems & Product Development
Mark Goerhing Systems & Product Development
Mary Hughson Network Architect
Jim Watts Director of Transmission Engineering
Carl Krentz Optical Transmission Engineer (Long Distance)
Gregg Palinski Manager, Transmission Engineering (Local Services)
Madan Shastri Optical Transmission Engineer (Long Distance)
Cory Tynon SONET Transmission Engineer (Local Services)
Shelby Jozwiak Sr. Operations Team Leader
Yvonne Brown Network Support Engineer
Duane Shaifer Manager of NOC
Pete Severts Director of NOC Operations
Mike Wormley Network Support Engineer
Charles Colbert SONET Manager
Dan Enright Sr. Vice President of Operations
Dave Keech Director of Engineering & Technology Planning (Local Services)
David Jorgensen Transmission Engineer (Local Services)
Tom Kramer Technology Manager
Tom Richardson Sr. Project Manager, Systems & Product Development
Mark Goerhing Systems & Product Development
Mary Hughson Network Architect