Changing Channels

raditional communications companies, led by AT&T Corp., still supply the federal government with the bulk of the network products and services on which agencies will spend $7.4 billion this year, according to INPUT, a market research firm in Vienna, Va.

Increasingly, however, agencies are looking for new ways to move bits and bytes. They're turning to nontraditional companies and even start-ups for emerging technologies that will cut their costs or stretch the capacity of their existing systems. Sometimes the agencies are putting new technologies to work. At other times the technologies are not new, but agencies are putting them to new uses.

Take the Postal Service, for example. Its New Orleans processing and distribution center is using a wireless telephone system from an Israeli company to improve efficiency and productivity. The Coral AirEase system from ECI Telecom is attached to the center's conventional telephone switch, known as a PBX, and acts like an extension of the basic phone system. It uses radio technology.

The center, a huge factory-style facility that sorts and distributes the mail 24 hours a day, has equipped almost 100 supervisors with wireless phones so they can be reached wherever they are working on the floor. That way, when a machine shuts down or some other processing glitch occurs, the appropriate supervisor can be contacted immediately to arrange for repairs and to reassign the idled workers.

The system works better than the pagers and portable radios it replaced, says Joe Frigo, manager of maintenance operations at the plant. "When you use radios," Frigo says, "you have a lot of cross talk," or interference, and less privacy than a phone system offers. The system costs less than alternatives the center considered, such as cellular phones or a replacement PBX. "We're a factory," Frigo says. "In a factory operation, this is ideal."

He says he can't quantify the benefits, but he thinks the system had a role in helping the center achieve its 1999 productivity improvement goals.

Satellite Services

Long-distance transmission via satellite is a different form of wireless service. The General Services Administration this year awarded a new series of satellite services contracts that are available to all agencies. The seven contractors offer a range of services, such as mobile telephone service, video broadcast transmission and basic data transmission.

April Ramey, director of the innovation center in GSA's Federal Technology Service, says a half dozen agencies, including the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs and the Internal Revenue Service, have used the contracts to arrange delivery of video training programs nationwide. DoD alone operates more than 1,100 classrooms where students engage in "distance learning."

An award-winning program in 1999 trained 2,000 employees of the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, simultaneously in one week. The nationwide training exercise, which relied on satellite transmissions, cost the agency less than $27 per trainee, compared with $625 for the classroom training used previously.

Besides such well-established programs, "agencies are going to be seeing new applications for satellite services," Ramey says.

For example, Hughes Global Services of El Segundo, Calif., offers a service called Orbcomm for short, simple data transmissions in standard formats. Likely applications include tracking of shipments or packages en route, plus reports from unmanned sensors in the field. The latter category could include weather readings or groundwater data, says FTS Program Manager Sabrina Crane. Orbcomm service "is very inexpensive for short data messages," she says.

Cable: More Than TV

When it comes to telephone service, television can be an alternative to business as usual. Cable television companies often have excess transmission capacity that they are happy to provide to agencies at favorable prices. In one such case, Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., installed a new telephone system provided by Cox Communications of Atlanta, the local cable TV company.

Cox built a fiber-optic ring linking the facilities at Langley, headquarters of the Air Combat Command. From that ring, Cox connects the base with many other military facilities in the Tidewater area of Virginia, with the Internet and with the public telephone network.

Sam Attisha, director of federal sales for Cox, says the new system has cut Langley's phone costs by 35 percent, while improving service. New features include caller ID and desktop videoconferencing. During peak periods before the 1998 changeover, Attisha says, outside circuits sometimes were not available to all would-be callers, but that no longer happens.

Costs were cut by consolidating the residential and business switches, and eliminating some high-speed data lines that were no longer needed after the basic network was upgraded. The network now carries voice, data and video traffic to more than 15,000 telephones in offices and base housing.

Similar savings have been achieved at Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City, where Cox also is providing local phone services, Attisha says.

Calls for Service

If you've ever posed a query to an agency other than your own without the name or phone number of a specific office that can provide the information or solve your problem, you may know how difficult it can be for citizens to work with federal agencies.

That's why agencies are turning to technology that makes them more accessible to ordinary people who haven't memorized the agency's organization chart. One such agency is the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which has set up a toll-free number to provide information about citizenship, visas, work permits and other issues.

Since December, callers have been able to dial toll-free to the service at (800) 375-5283. An automated system provides six menu options in English or Spanish. During the first few months of operation, 30 percent of the callers were able to get the desired information without talking to a live operator.

Sprint Communications Co. developed the interactive voice response system and is providing the enhanced 800-number service to INS under the government's FTS 2001 long-haul telecom contract. The service routes the calls to INS customer service centers in Barbourville, Ky., and Woodlawn, Md., changing the allocation of calls to one center or the other according to the time of day and the volume of calls.

Agency officials expect the 800 number to improve customer service without commensurate increases in the INS payroll.

Internet Calls

For several years, telecommunications pundits have held out the promise of "convergence"-a rosy future in which today's separate voice and data networks will be replaced by a huge internetworking system that connects every kind of device and user. In a sense, it's already happening. In many areas, telephone signals are converted from their native "analog" format into digital data that is indistinguishable from other computer-generated information as both kinds of transmissions travel over the same local and national telephone networks.

But in another sense, convergence isn't materializing at anywhere near the predicted rates. Phone calls usually go through phone switches en route to big backbone networks, while the Internet and other data networks have their own gateways. The two kinds of transmissions are handled differently. The phone traffic moves more slowly and steadily, avoiding the volume peaks and valleys that characterize most data traffic.

Industry surveys suggest that such distinctions will persist, particularly in the communications environments of large national corporations and federal agencies. Major communications companies are preparing to offer new integrated voice and data services, but large customers will probably be among the last to take the plunge.

In the federal government, agencies have begun testing the idea of sending phone calls over the Internet. It's far less expensive to transmit large quantities of bits over the Internet than over long-distance phone lines. Yet recent analyses have begun to suggest that other costs associated with using the Internet for voice, including the cost of installing a whole new technical infrastructure for your phone system, could well offset the reductions in transmission costs.

Whether that's true will be determined in tests such as the one the Air Force has begun at Mildenhall Air Force Base in England. As an alternative to sending Mildenhall's calls through the expensive and technically incompatible British Telecom phone system, the Air Force hired Nortel Networks to set up an Internet phone system. By the end of this month, 170 of Nortel's Internet phones are supposed to be operational at the base, which has several thousand phones.

Demands Outstrip Supply

It's not news that the federal government is continually expanding its data networks. But it's a little-known fact that agencies, along with private-sector telecom users, are having to get in line for more network capacity.

In December 1998, for example, the Defense Information Systems Agency ordered a high-speed fiber-optic line for the Pentagon. A year later, the local telephone company, Bell Atlantic, still had not installed the line. "It took us almost 15 months before it was delivered," says Peter Paulson, DISA's network operations chief, adding that the situation is not unusual these days.

Such backlogs are by no means limited to Bell Atlantic, Paulson says. "This is pervasive across the continental United States," he says, and it affects corporate customers as well as government ones. For the most part, it's a local access problem rather than a shortage of long-haul capacity, Paulson says.

The emergence of alternative local phone companies (known in the business as "competitive local exchange carriers" or CLECs) was supposed to expand the supply of network capacity, or bandwidth. DISA does business with CLECs, Paulson says, but "they don't go everywhere we need to go."

As users urgently demand more bandwidth, DISA is trying to squeeze more data through its existing lines. Faced with a months-long wait for new lines into a DoD facility in North Philadelphia, for example, DISA added devices called Acclerators from Expand Networks Inc. to both ends of an existing data line. The devices have sophisticated software that allocates bandwidth intelligently among users.

The result was immediate, Paulson says. The line that had been at capacity suddenly could handle almost twice as much traffic. DISA has ordered more of the devices and plans to use them as stopgap measures, he says.