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Networking Enhances The Picture At KBLCOM

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by Linda Nicastro

Networking promises many benefits, including the opportunity to improve communications, enable remote users and reduce paperwork. KBLCOM, a cable television provider in San Antonio, Texas, has begun to reap these rewards from a wide-area Ethernet network it built just 18 months ago. KBLCOM is the parent company of Paragon Cable and provides 670,000 customers in Oregon, California, Texas and Minnesota, with services such as cable installation and pay-per-view programming. The network covers 12 cities, with sites linked by T1 lines, 56-Kbps connections and frame relay circuits. The network has 1,500 nodes, 27 servers running NetWare v3.12, two Lotus Notes servers, an IBM AS/400, an IBM mainframe and 22 routers. Productivity applications include Lotus cc:Mail, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and NetSoft Elite 400 emulation software to access financial and customer data. NetWare for SAA gateways provides links to the AS/400 and mainframe and Citrix WinView facilitates dial-in services. "Our main goal is to provide better service to our customers using the network," says Tony Coleman, manager of communication systems at KBLCOM. E-mail, he adds, has greatly improved communications throughout the company and all employees use it, from field personnel to senior management. The mainframe, located at a service bureau, runs a customer information system that is critical to KBLCOM's business. In the past, synchronous data lines were used to establish point-to-point connections between the mainframe and various cable systems. Today, KBLCOM uses a T1 line, translating bridge and SDLC servers to run SNA traffic over Ethernet and achieve better response time, increased throughput and a 50-percent reduction in synchronous lines.

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