Bank of Buck Rogers
by February 2, 2004 12:00 am 83 views
Arkansas National Bank has continued its history as a technology pioneer with the recent installation of a gigabit fiber-optic network.
The bank hired VeriSource Inc. of Rogers and the regional office of Cox Communications Inc. in Springdale to develop the connectivity backbone that includes more than 35 miles of dedicated lines between ANB’s headquarters and its eight other Northwest Arkansas offices. The investment includes a 10-megabit virtual local area network (VLAN) for voice and a separate 10-megabit VLAN for data streaming.
Basically, that means it transfers voice and data at a blistering 20-megabit-per-second pace and that an entire gigabit of information can be transferred from one office to the other in 90 seconds. ANB wouldn’t say how much it spent on its toys.
The bank is also set up to expand its bandwidth up to 100 megabits with no additional hardware. Dan Dykema, ANB’s chairman and CEO, said the bank can now run larger applications such as photo identity verification, do more frequent and complete data backups, and conduct a variety of other applications.
VeriSource, the area’s largest privately held business technology firm, managed the fiber network installation, configured ANB hardware and wrote custom software as needed. Cox provided the fiber lines, the network design and installed networking equipment at ANB locations.