Rock Island Communications is a Digital Solutions provider located in Friday Harbor, Washington. To establish the excellence of service this small company strives to give its customers in a relatively remote area meant that self-sufficiency was a must. Power outages are going to happen here. To deal with this issue, a 20KW Diesel Generator is coupled to an automatic starter and load transfer switch. In the event of a power outage, the system will start the generator automatically and initiate a load transfer to start supplying a UPS system with backup power. BEST Ferrups UPS systems protect their network. Power bypass and transfer switches allow power to be rerouted around UPS and battery systems to permit maintenance to be accomplished without having to power down equipment.

The secure, climate controlled data center houses servers, customer co-located systems, and main Dial-Up facilities. Only top brand networking equipment is used, such as Cisco core routers, 3Com, Lucent, and Extreme networks for dial-up and core switching functions. Carrier class equipment is utilized for its reliability and performance under a heavy load. Since over 80% of the Internet traffic for the San Juan Islands passes through their facility, they feel they can't afford to do it any other way.

Rock Island maintains a private microwave channel that provides an alternate backbone link. Currently a DS2 (4xT1), it will be upgraded to a DS3 (28xT1) in late 2002. They also maintain multiple connections to the Internet via separate carriers (Savvis, Genuity and Semaphore with AT&T to be added in 2002), which provide redundant links to the Internet. When one carrier is having trouble in its network, traffic gets out to the Internet over their alternate paths.