ELI's backbone is one of the largest in the western United States, with services ranging from local telephone to high speed broadband.

by Jeff Goldman [April 6, 2005]

Electric Lightwave (ELI) was founded in 1990, and was acquired by Citizens Communications in 2002; the company is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Citizens. ELI's packet over SONET backbone reaches over 4,700 miles, making it one of the largest ringed OC192 SONET systems in the western U.S. In addition to ELI's own backbone,

The network uses Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol to improve traffic flow and maximize quality of service. ELI manages its network to maintain peak bandwidth utilization of 50 percent at all times; when traffic approaches that level, the company orders more capacity. ELI's SLAs offer 100 percent network availability, along with guarantees regarding installation, latency, and throughput.

ELI has POPs in Seattle, Salt Lake City, Palo Alto, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Portland, Phoenix, Boise, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Newark, Rochester, and Washington, D.C. These are inter-connected with diversely routed, self-healing SONET rings, with dual Cisco 12000 series or dual Juniper M-series routers to provide fault-tolerant service.

Available value added services include primary and secondary domain name service and IP addressing, managed router service, and news feed and news reader services.

Key features of the network include:

• Facilities-based OC48/OC12 national backbone
• Over 200 private peering relationships
• Seats in eleven NAPs:
  • Seattle-IX
  • PAIX-Seattle
  • Oregon-IX
  • PAIX-Palo Alto
  • MAE-West
  • MAE-Central
  • Chicago SBC NAP (AADS)
  • Equinix Chicago
  • PAIX Vienna
  • MAE-East
  • Equinix Ashburn
• 12000 Core and Gateway Routers
• Juniper M-Series Core, Edge, and Gateway Routers
• Backbone utilization managed to 50 percent peak utilization
• Instant re-route capability
• Intelligent routing using OSPF internally, BGP4 externally
• Latency and throughput guarantees
• NetTrends web tool to check circuit performance

Available access types:

• Fractional T1
• Dedicated T1
• Balanced T1 pair
• Multi T1 (up to 8 T1s combined)
• Fractional, Full, and measured-use DS3
• Fractional, Full, and measured-use OC3, OC12
• 10/100/1000Mb Ethernet, flat rate and measured-use

• Static routing
• Border Gateway Protocol, version 4 (BGP4)