When Jack Pond joined Montgomery County, Pa., as CIO last year, he faced an immediate network crisis: AT&T could no longer support the county's aging FDDI  metropolitan-area network, and Pond had 45 days to upgrade or find an alternative service provider.

This summer, Pond will finish migrating all the county's voice and data traffic to three redundant, private fiber-optic rings that provide Gigabit Ethernet service. The new network offers 22 times more capacity than the old FDDI network, and Pond estimates the county will save $3.5 million over five years by combining voice and data over a common network infrastructure.

"I don't know of any other county in the U.S. who has gone so far so quickly" in terms of network technology, Pond says.

Since 1994, Montgomery County - which is 20 miles west of Philadelphia - has used an FDDI backbone ring to connect 50 government buildings, including administrative offices, courts and public health centers. The FDDI network was cobbled together using a hub-and-spoke design that included T-1 and T-3 links. AT&T was under contract to manage the FDDI network.

"We had leased these services from another company that was bought out several times and ended up with AT&T," Pond says. "AT&T inherited us, and they were very good to us. They continued to support us after our contract expired, but finally they said they couldn't support our FDDI network anymore."

AT&T gave the county 18 months' notice that it was discontinuing its FDDI support. The county issued an RFP and received eight responses.

Pond's first step was to negotiate a six-month extension from AT&T. After that, the county's FDDI network would be shut down, he agreed.

Then Pond and his team sat down with the proposals to find a reliable, high-bandwidth network to support online applications used by its population of 760,000.

"This was a very successful, low-cost system with relatively high bandwidth," Pond says of the old FDDI network. "My job was to provide something equally good at the same cost."

Pond's top priority was to get a replacement network in quickly to provide data services to the 3,600 county employees. Because he has a small IT shop, he needed the new network to be easy to manage, redundant and self-healing.

"We also wanted the network to be scalable, and we wanted to be able to integrate it with schools and community colleges in the future. We wanted to be able to incrementally enhance it," Pond says. "We also needed 24-7 monitoring and service."

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