[comm] No communications meeting today

[Gareth Hunt]

Guys,

Reminder: meetings will be held as needed.  I will circulate an agenda as
          necessary.

I think that there is no need for a face-to-face meeting today.  

There has, however, been significant movement on the intranet front.  We
did indeed get an updated quote from GRCI (AT&T) in response to some
questions that Gene and I had.

  The bad news is that the quote is actually higher than the previous
  quote.  Primarily, this is because of an increase in what they now
  want to charge us for the St. Croix link.

  The good news is that the business office has agreed that we should go
  ahead and accept this quote.  If everything goes according to plan, we
  will issue a contract to the Department of the Interior to manage this
  contract on our behalf until Feb 28 2002.

When is this all going to happen?  Good question.  We were party to an
amazing exchange between our business office and the DoI contract
office.  It seems that they can indeed accept an NRAO purchase order.
The only remaining issue is that DoI requires that they have a PO for
the amount for the entire contract period.  So we have to get approval
from the NSF to place the order, since the total is over $100,000.  (Of
course, in the past, the service was billed monthly by AT&T, so there
was no need for such approval. <sigh>)  I have provided text to Bill
Porter to use for the justification.  This may take a couple of weeks.
So to answer the question: at the beginning of April if all goes well.

Now I have to say that this is *supposed* to transition without a hitch.
However, Gene's experience is that no transition, however apparently
simple, goes smoothly.  So please be prepared for some "unexpected"
network outages at the beginning of April.  We will keep you informed of
progress.

Cheers,
Gareth.