Moving Mountains to Develop Resilient, Reliable Connectivity

The Pacific Northwest is stunningly beautiful. Its jaw-dropping geographical features, such as Puget Sound and the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, inspire residents to spend time in nature. Unfortunately, these features can prove exceptionally challenging when it comes to maintaining reliable internet service — especially in more remote areas.

Yet even in this region, more people than ever depend on reliable, uninterrupted connectivity to live and work.

Andrew Horton, CEO of Redundant Networks, believes locals deserve better. The company’s top priority is to deliver high availability, seamless failover and resilient network performance for critical applications across the Olympic Peninsula.

“Our primary customers are residential customers who often work from home,” notes Horton. “Essential, reliable connectivity and IT support is crucial because it ensures people stay online during critical work hours, enhancing their experience and productivity.”

Providing that service required the team to answer one important question: What’s the best way to keep people online during outages?

Geographic diversity requires innovative solutions

Maintaining connectivity and IT support is vital to area residents’ quality of life, yet the Olympic Peninsula’s geography makes laying fiber infrastructure difficult. The initial installation method and layout of the fiber resulted in frequent outages, which led to a poor experience for residents.

“Before we started working with Lumen, downtime was a thing for us,” says Horton. “It was frustrating for us and a lot of our customers.”

Customers generally understood that outages happen and an infrastructure can sometimes fail, but the team at Redundant Networks wanted to do better for their users.

As a business owner, Horton understands his customers’ challenges, which drove him to work with Lumen to build reliable backup connections and keep businesses and residents online.

“Lumen helped us build our geographically diverse redundant fiber ring, which allows us to serve our customers across the region, something other area providers had been unable to accomplish,” Horton says.

Using dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology and Lumen® Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) circuits have made it possible to build vital redundancy into the network, so Redundant Networks can perform upgrades as needed without having to rebuild infrastructure.

“DWDM allows us to have the flexibility to upgrade our circuits without taking the whole network offline or making expensive changes,” Horton says. Lumen also helped Horton and his team establish an underwater route, which other providers had told him wasn’t a possibility. With Lumen, it was possible.

 Caring people, reliable infrastructure

The Lumen team added a human touch to the project that was just as impactful as the technology. A dedicated account manager worked alongside Horton and his team from start to finish.

“Lumen was able to help us accomplish some big goals just by putting a human being behind the service,” he says. “It’s not just a phone number, not just a name, not just a bill, but someone who actually cares about their customers. Anyone can be a big telecom provider, but if you don’t have the right people behind it, people who care and want to see your success, what’s the point?”

The combined human and technical resources from Lumen allowed Redundant Networks to add international and local transit to their network, allowing them to expand outside the county and add high-speed bandwidth.

Delivering the connections customers crave

These upgrades provide customers with an improved, more consistent experience.

“At the end of the day, our responsibility as an internet service provider is to provide an internet connection that doesn’t go offline. By working with Lumen, we were able to accomplish that goal and have amazing uptime and high-speed internet where originally it wasn’t an option in the area.”

What was once a region plagued by unreliable service is now a community with some of the most resilient and high-speed connectivity available. For Horton and Redundant Networks, the transformation is about more than just technology — it’s about delivering a high-quality customer experience in a region where excellent service wasn’t expected, but has now become the standard.

To learn more about Redundant Networks transformation, read the full customer success story.

Visit our customer story library to learn how organizations in virtually every industry are achieving their business objectives.

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