Equity first is a mortgage brokerage located in New england.

Its primary oprations center is located in Exeter,New Hampshire, with ten branch offices in maine and Massachussets. The operations center is located in a large building in an office park. It houses two main functional divisions; administrative and technical. The administrative division includes functions such a accounting, human resources, excecutive managament, and support staff. The technical division includes main frame operations, networking, and IT support. The LAN is disigned to run gigabit Ethernet to dekstops and has a 10 gbps fiber backbone. The primary protocol used on the Equity Firs network TCP/IP. The operations center maintens a central database used to store customer informations, such as loan applications, credit check informations, and approval status. They also maintain a Microsoft Backoffice suite of applications. This includes an Exchange sever used for email and Microsoft Office applications. First Equity uses an internet for all corporate communication. Company information is distributed via a fram of windows 2000 Server Web servers. Employees fill out time sheets online, download and submit benefist forms, make vacations request,etc. Equity fist also maintains an extranet, which it uses to work woth some of its vendors, including credit reporting agencies and realtors. The organization connects to its ISP via a dedicated T3 connection. The branch office are located inb small buildings. Each branch runs a 100BaseT Ethernet LAN.TCP/IP allows them Internet access aswell as connections back to the operations center for mainfarame connection, data transfer, and access to the corporate internet. Each branch has windows 2000 server File server, and a Cisco 2600 series router to connect with the operations center. All desktop computers in the branch office run Microsoft Outlook. Email is received via the Exchange server located at operations. The branch office use a dial-on-demand, internet-connection sharing router to connect to local ISPs for Internet access via 128k ISDN lines. Internet access infrequent in the branch offices, therefore this was a cost effective implementation. The challange faced by the IT director, Matt Stanley, is the connectivity between the branch offices and operations. Some of the branch office connect via dedicated TI leased lines, while others use BRI ISDN connections. The cost of the dedicated lines runs up to $1,200 per month for each branch. In addition, Equity first maintains all of the equipment connecting to the carrier services. If a router or CSU/DSU stops functioning, a support technician from operations has to drive to the branch office to fix the problem. This has coused downtime up to two hours in the past. Mr. Stanley decided to meet with sales representatives from MCI to discuss some of their WAN soutions. After reviewing their presentation and cost proposal he decided on a frame relay solution. Each branch now has a 128k PVC to the operations center. The frame relay carrier, MCI, hadles all switching and maintainance. Equity First provides the router at each site, which connect to the frame relay switch via a leased line also provided by MCI. Although the negotiated CIR is 128k, they normally receive significantly higher throughput. In the future, there may be a need for some or all of the branch offices to link to each other. By implementing the frame relay infrastructure, this can be easily accomplished by adding additional virtual circuits to the singles access point. A mesh topology can be created by contacting MCI and making configuration changes on the router. Executive management at Equity First is very pleased with the new WAN design. The company has experienced reduced cost by converting to the frame relay switched WAN architecture. They eliminated the costs of multiple dedicated lines, and they also saved support costs since support is now handled by MCI. The cost savings will be used to expand their extranet, and to make more Web services available to their customers.

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Business What factor caused equity first to begin looking at alternative WAN solutions? What was the financial impact of converting to frame relay? How will this solution affect customers and employees of equity first? Applications What applications are currently running on the network? Data what types of the are maintained by equity first? What ware the data transfer rates with dedicated lines? How does the new frame relay network affect data transfer rates? Network Why did equity first convert from leased to frame Relay? What general networking technologies will be used to deliver the solutions? What is a CIR and what CIR did equity first have? Technology What devices will be used to connect to the frame relay network? Why does equity first consider it a benefit to allow MCI to take over support for their WAN?