THE OHN TECHNICAL PLAN IS SIMPLE
OHN arranges for its participants to contract with telecommunications vendors to provide a guaranteed amount of reliable data capacity from their location to an Oregon data switching facility in Portland, the Northwest Access Exchange (NWAX).

NWAX permits each end user site to connect with many other sites throughout Oregon, including all OHN participant sites. Therefore, one connection from a clinic would be sufficient for it to reach any medical facility in Oregon with high quality service. Even though different telecommunications vendors provide service to different facilities in different parts of the state, the guaranteed availability and quality of service on each link to the central switch is sufficient to ensure that the connection between any two locations will permit reliable real-time medical consultations and procedures.

OHN'S TECHNICAL APPROACH
Prior to OHN, health facilities had two basic choices for data network connectivity.

1. They could lease dedicated lines between pairs of locations or
   
2. They could use the public Internet
   

Leased line solutions for data are similar to the earliest days of voice telephony before the advent of central office telephone switches, when conversations were possible only between two points on the opposite ends of a line. Once central office switches were introduced, customers only needed one line to the central office and could be connected there to any other customer without being required to arrange for lines to any other location. OHN provides a similar solution for data networking in Oregon by requiring a high quality link from each end user location to a common data switching location. That single broadband connection then permits reliable connectivity with every other end user location connected to the switch.

This high quality broadband connectivity is quite different from that of the public Internet. Because the Internet is not a single network but is the result of interconnecting a large number of independent networks throughout the world, no Internet Service Provider (ISP) can control the quality of service except on its own portion of the complex network. Consequently, all ISP contracts are “best efforts” contracts with no guarantees of the amount or quality of data transport provided. Since all of the major Internet connection points on the west coast of the United States are in California or Washington, almost all Oregon Internet traffic is routed out of state before getting from one Oregon destination to another.

The lack of quality guarantees has made the public Internet unsuitable for real-time medical applications, including telemedicine consults and real-time medical education applications. (Health facilities are using the Internet for some of these applications, but complaints about lack of quality have limited the amount of use.) OHN makes it possible to obtain the economic advantages of Internet-like data transmission and the availability of connections to a very large number of sites, while retaining the quality of service that was previously available only on dedicated leased lines.

NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER (NOC) by Easystreet
EasyStreet, an entrepreneurial Oregon business located in Beaverton, describes itself as Oregon’s leading managed services provider. One of their service offerings is network operations center (NOC) services designed to monitor data network operations, respond to early warning signals to prevent outages and provide trouble-shooting support when problems do occur. EasyStreet was the winning bidder among three competing companies offering such services in response to an OHN competitive procurement for the OHN NOC.

EasyStreet will install monitoring devices (picture referenced at right)at OHN participant premises and at the OHN primary network interconnection point at the NorthWest Access Exchange (NWAX) in Portland. These devices will permit the OHN NOC to monitor OHN data traffic in real time and determine whether OHN network vendors are meeting their quality of service guarantees.

Unlike the public Internet, which provides “best efforts” services with no guarantee of network capacity or quality, OHN data services require guaranteed service quality sufficient for real time medical and educational applications. EasyStreet technicians are available 24 hours a day 365 days a year to help OHN participants prevent network outages or quality degradations and to help diagnose problems and restore service quickly when network problems occur.

OHN's REGIONAL EXCHANGES

To learn more about the southern and central exchanges, click here.

DOWNLOAD "Technical Plan for OHN"
by Ed Parker
President, Parker Telecommunications
OHN Technology Committee Co-Chair