Qwest aims to boost service in S. Utah

ST. GEORGE — Qwest Communications announced Monday it has invested in a redundant fiber-optic network path from St. George to Salt Lake City, the second such line to provide uninterrupted service to Utah's Dixie.

"This is a very important investment in southern Utah," Qwest's Utah president Jerry Fenn said during a press conference at Dixie State College. "This line will instantly reroute calls in the event the main line goes down. This will protect all of southern Utah from any future service outages."

Nine months ago, for 12 long hours and 10 agonizing minutes, all communication in southern Utah was disrupted after a backhoe operator near Richfield tore a Qwest fiber-optic line.

In December, a privately funded company announced it would provide uninterrupted communications service to St. George through a redundant fiber-optic line. At the time, Qwest's 12-hour service outage played prominently in a press conference held by the company, Utah InterLinx.

Fenn said Qwest customers will not have to experience that kind of frustration ever again.

"I don't think you'll ever see a repeat of what happened last May," Fenn promised the local business leaders and elected officials who attended the news conference.

"I understand the concern when communications go down; it can cause a great deal of angst. I also understand the development that's occurring in southern Utah, and our number one goal is to provide first-rate service to those customers."

The redundant network will reroute calls if service is interrupted, with emergency services and customers with guaranteed redundancy moving to the new line first. While Fenn and other Qwest officials would not disclose the project cost or its physical path from St. George to Salt Lake City, they did say installing the line was the "easy part."

"Lighting the network is extraordinarily expensive," Fenn said.

Qwest was unable to provide the redundant line until the Federal Communications Commission agreed to relax its rules of interconnection between local and long-distance companies, he added.

"We couldn't legally connect the two, and we didn't think that was fair," Fenn said. "We petitioned the FCC to relax the rules, and they did that in mid-2004."

Once that was accomplished, Fenn said he was successful in moving southern Utah's needs higher up the priority list of Qwest projects.

"We've been working on it for some period of time," he said. "But the break in service probably crystallized the nature of the issue for senior management. It certainly got people to focus on it."

Qwest's redundant network will be able to transmit about 2.5 million e-mails, each carrying about five paragraphs of text, in one second. At the same time, said Fenn, the circuits could simultaneously handle 32,000 phone calls.

Several top Qwest employees were also transferred to the St. George area, a move that seemed to go over well with those at the press conference.

---

E-mail: nperkins@desnews.com