Bandwidth Initiative

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

Maricopa County Chief Information Officer David Stevens initiated a bandwidth study in July 2014 to ensure that the County had sufficient bandwidth for current and future demands and to provide circuit redundancy where it strategically and fiscally made sense. The Office of Enterprise Technology (OET) worked with CenturyLink, as our carrier services provider, to evaluate current demands and to project future demands required for technologies being adopted by the County, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephones, Geographic Information Service (GIS), electronic filing, Unified Communications, and video conferencing to name a few. The evaluation resulted in a recommendation to adjust bandwidth on 132 circuits. OET negotiated with CenturyLink to have the one-time costs for the required and expensive construction activities waived for work like trenching to support new circuits. Furthermore, OET leveraged new pricing models to provide unexpected value to the County; specifically, value in the form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection for internet circuits and circuit diversity, which is a redundant circuit through a different carrier office, for the County’s main regional centers.