The SureWest Network
Since establishing itself in the Kansas City metropolitan area in July of 2000 as Everest Connections and becoming part of the SureWest brand in July of 2008, SureWest has constructed over 1,000 miles of state-of-the-art Hybrid/Fiber/Coax (HFC) network passing over 70,000 homes and businesses in Lenexa, Shawnee, Overland Park and southern Kansas City. In addition to this network, SureWest owns and operates multiple metro-loop SONET OC48 rings serving all major business corridors including the downtown Kansas City, MO loop. To date, we have a substantial investment in our commitment to provide long-term service to the communities we serve, and continue to expand our network with a focus on reliability and customer service. The carrier class, service provider Internet / Data and voice infrastructure is used to serve residential, institutional and business customers with innovative solutions to their telecommunication requirements. This fully redundant network comprises multiple levels of redundancy, hardware, software, geographical and multiple providers, for an unparalleled level of customer satisfaction.

Using fiber-optic technology, SureWest provides cable TV, phone, data and high-speed Internet services to businesses in the greater Kansas City area. Our products can be customized to meet your business needs, ensuring the greatest choice, convenience and value in telecommunications services.

SureWest offers carrier-class telecommunication services to small, mid and large size businesses. We currently own, operate and maintain a number of state-of-the-art metropolitan area fiber rings. SureWest extends these rings with redundant entries or point-to-point fiber connections to our customers. These links provide all the advantages of fiber transmission systems over traditional copper links such as immunity to interference, a very low BER (bit error rate), higher bandwidth and lower signal loss. The geographical distribution of the SureWest fiber within the metropolitan area takes advantage of the survivability and redundancy provided by diverse paths. Our infrastructure is directly attached to the self-healing fiber ring to provide reliable, carrier-class voice and data communications to our customers.

The SureWest network topology uses SONET and NG SONET (next generation SONET) as the transmission standard. The use of the SONET standard in the SureWest network brings a number of benefits to our business customers. SONET is a reliable international standard for fiber optic transmission. It is possible to deploy SONET in a multi-vendor environment with the transmitter from one vendor and the receiver from another. This allows for "mid-span meet" configurations and service provider redundancy since equipment from one service provider can transmit and receive data from another service provider. SONET also combines multiplexing and cross-connecting functions in the same physical device. This combination simplifies management of the network elements, reduces the need for linking multiplexers and digital cross-connects, and reduces the need for cabling between terminations and patch panels. The amount of available bandwidth in SureWest SONET-based network will be able to support our customer's services and network needs including Internet connectivity, LAN/MAN/WAN connectivity, carrier-class full feature voice communications, video and whiteboard, and teleconference applications.

SureWest operates one of the largest Transport Infrastructure Networks in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Our current infrastructure includes multiple SONET OC48 rings and Cisco DPT (Distributed Packet Transport) rings. SureWest has the capability to scale the SONET ring to an OC192 configuration or multiple DWDM frequencies if and when required. SureWest is collocated in both SBC Tandem offices for the purpose of Interconnection Trunks, 911, 411, Operator Services and direct trunking to long distance carriers (LECs, CLECs, ILECs and IXCs). SureWest has full geographical redundancy with multiple main hubs in different areas of the Kansas City metropolitan area.

In the SureWest Transport network, convergence times in case of failure will be less than 50 ms. Each optical node in the SureWest network also offers 1+1 protection for all major components to add a level of redundancy.

Common Internet Architecture
SureWest owns and operates a completely redundant core router infrastructure. We have multiple redundancies built into our Internet connectivity. SureWest connects to the Internet with multiple optical (OC-n level) links to multiple tier one providers at multiple geographical sites. Our core routers are fully hardware redundant Gigabit Switch Routers (GSR Cisco 12000 series) linked through a Spatial Reuse Protocol / Dynamic Packet Transport (SRP/DPT) Optical Carrier ring. This gives SureWest an unparalleled level of redundancy and survivability. Our multiple providers are managed in a solid multihomed ISP environment with redundant BGP 4 links for path determination.

Our routers and NG SONET transport elements are linked to ring fiber that conforms to international standards for physical path redundancy and minimum physical separation between paths.

SureWest also owns enough Internet public addresses to handle any IP addressing concerns of our customers.