SRP's dark fiber network spans over 15 cities

SRP Telecom operates one of the largest private fiber-optic communications networks in Arizona, spanning 15 cities in our electrical service territory. We offer the most geographically pervasive, competitive fiber network in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Our fiber spans 2,900-square-miles; we literally have fiber from one end of the Valley of the Sun to the other.

These assets are available to carriers, Internet service providers and application service providers for lease, thereby enabling delivery of highly integrated subscriber services.

SRP Telecom's Wireline Solutions offers a robust suite of optical network infrastructure services ranging from custom private optical network solutions to wireless backhaul services.

We can provide customized solutions to the unique network challenges of the expansive Phoenix metropolitan marketplace. By leasing SRP's existing dark-fiber or wireless-site backhaul services, customers can future-proof their network with unlimited bandwidth. Utilizing SRP's right-of-way (ROW), fiber and conduit enable the interconnection of scalable and reliable telecommunication and data networks, providing you with a competitive edge in your speed-to-market deployments.

Strategic benefits

Often our customer relationships start with a single tactical opportunity. But, over time, our customers discover unexpected strategic benefits of a relationship with SRP.

The Phoenix market is growing all the time, usually out, not up. Our electric system expands with that growth and along with it, our fiber system. More often than not, our fiber will be in economic reach of any new commercial development. Customers with master agreements with us have a competitive advantage - the ability to quickly and confidently compete for this new business. You won't be handcuffed by having to sell the same joint trench network as your competitors or by the uncertainty involved with securing capacity from the LEC.

In fact, SRP may be your answer to the unbundled network element platform problem. Now you can control your own destiny with fiber capacity on a network that grows as the market grows. Once you acquire a fundamental metropolitan network from SRP, you can incrementally grow your network by adding network or customer nodes cost-effectively.

Many of our customers have discovered SRP as a ready source for other fundamental network facilities. We provide facilities and locations for regeneration sites, transmission network hub locations and even property for full switch sites to several of our customers. These facilities are often in secured, electric locations.

Further benefits of the SRP Wireline network include:

Customer reach:

While we do have 20 central offices, switches and other carrier points-of-presence on-net, and serve as a fundamental access and transport network for some of our carrier customers, our greatest strength may be our ability to reach enterprise customers. Since our network is deployed and co-located along with our electric transmission system, your prospects are in close proximity to our fiber network.

Presently we have more than 200 on-net and near-net commercial buildings and business campuses, including the facilities of some of the biggest names in corporate America.

By coordinating new fiber build-out with our electric system expansion, we extend our network cost-effectively to new commercial buildings and customers, usually well ahead of other fiber providers. No other competitive fiber network has this reach and ability.

Design flexibility:

Custom private optical network services refer to those services involving physical communication connectivity, including dark-fiber network design and engineering, ROW development, permitting and easements, build and construction, maintenance and repair. Wireless cell site backhaul services transport wireless traffic from the wireless site to the Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO). SRP utilizes its extensive fiber- optic network to accomplish this task in two distinct ways:

  • Fiber to the Cell Site - Today or in the future, SRP is well positioned to enable the infrastructure of modern broadband 3G, 4G and LTE networks. Seventy-two percent of all tier-one wireless-carrier sites are within one mile of SRP's network. SRP can provide a private dark-fiber solution to address your growing backhaul capacity needs. With SRP Telecom's dark-fiber solution, we can craft a custom, redundant and robust dark-fiber network that connects your distributed network edge wireless sites to the core, offering you a competitive market advantage.
  • SONET Services - Our DS1 private line service goes to SRP-built cell sites. Today carriers rely on SRP's private SONET ring topology to provide a highly robust and redundant architecture. The entire network operates at 99.999% reliability.

We don't offer just a "cookie-cutter ring" like other available Phoenix fiber networks. With our 1,600 route miles (an amount that is growing all the time), composed of some 2,200 individual segments, with splice points about every linear mile, we offer the unique ability to create responsive solutions to your network requirements, often with multiple route options.

We prefer to offer ringed topologies for maintenance quality reasons but we offer point-to-point solutions, or extensions, to your existing rings. We've delivered solutions ranging from a 150-plus route mile, multi-node metropolitan area private dark-fiber network, to a single 500-foot data center building entrance.

Custom pricing and flexible terms:

Since we don't offer cookie-cutter fiber solutions, we don't offer cookie-cutter prices. Each customer and each project is unique. SRP has the flexibility to consider your requirements and price each project accordingly. We understand that our costs are only one component of your deal and must prove in along with your hardware, OpEx, margin and overhead to meet return criteria on revenue or cost-reduction objectives. Your capital expenses are lowered since, typically, we bundle any new construction into our recurring lease price.

We can provide a full end-to-end solution, including backbone, laterals, customer premises entrances and terminating facilities. Or we can unbundle our solutions if necessary, letting you handle building entrances, for example, or providing point-to-point backbone fiber segments to complement yours.

We offer terms ranging from 12 months to 20 years in monthly, quarterly, annual or lump sum payments.

Our quotes are accurate and our quote process is designed to support your sales cycle. We provide an initial quote that gives you the information you need for budgetary pricing.

When you get to the point when you need price certainty, we offer a firm, fixed quote with a set fiber-delivery interval. This often requires some field engineering work, so it can take a few weeks. A nominal fee applies but is credited against an executed product order. You'll have a detailed physical layer design to review with your customer.

Reliability:

Our fiber is primarily aluminum-clad Optical Ground Wire (OPGW) co-located with SRP's high-voltage electric system in our own right-of-way. What does this mean for our carrier and enterprise customers? A trustworthy, secure, reliable network that is independent of other networks, important in today's uncertain times.

Since our fiber is typically 60 to 120 feet above ground, protected by high-voltage electric facilities and accessed by pole-mounted splice cases, disturbances that commonly occur with underground and under-built systems are almost unheard of. In fact, data from Telecordia reveals that aerial fiber cable is more reliable than underground and that OPGW is the most reliable aerial cable.

Network Reliability Steering Committee data for all network categories of "facility failure" indicated that underground cable damage accounted for 72% of incidents, compared to 6% for aerial cable. Service-affecting failure rate data for both ADSS and OPGW cables reveal them to be more than 18 times more reliable than conventional in-ground systems.

And unlike facilities in the public right-of-way where access is very difficult to control, SRP's network, using our private right-of-way and electric facilities, makes our fiber readily accessible only by SRP personnel, which provides an additional level of security.

Fiber specifications:

Since our network was deployed primarily for a 30-ring, 328 node SONET network to support our mission-critical electric and water operations, it is engineered to carrier-class standards. We're using the network to control and secure telemetry from hundreds of millions of dollars of electric transmission and distribution system equipment that support a $2 billion electric business revenue stream.

Since SRP field operations personnel are the only technicians who touch our fiber, rest assured you will receive the operational excellence your network requires. We don't use "rent-a-techs" that may not have the same vested interest in the quality of network performance.

We define specific service levels relating to emergency response duration, mean time to repair, status notification, fiber system attenuation and other performance dimensions. Procedures and obligations are thoroughly documented in our master agreement and tailored, to the extent possible, to each customer.

We thoroughly test, end-to-end, each segment and the total system. Test results are documented in a comprehensive acceptance package.

Our method of procedure for standard maintenance activities and scheduled outages is well tested over several years with several customers.