ACD's dedicated Network Operations Command Center is located in Lansing, Michigan. The NOCC serves as our system for all network and server related operations for ACD. We understand that you expect your server and network reliability is second to none. All customer service requests come into our NOCC, so that customers and carriers have direct access to our customer support, engineering, provisioning, and troubleshooting.

Unlike many companies, we do not have a separation of our network engineering and our customer support. Their function is the same: To provide highly reliable service to our customers and to fix any issues or problems as quickly as possible.

Our customer support people are rotated through various tasks, including working on various parts of our networks. We believe in extensive cross training, so that we do not have any single points of failure (just like our network) among our personnel.

We have a Monitor Everything policy. We expect any and all network elements are proactively monitored so that any network or server anomaly can be resolved before it becomes an issue for our customers or affects our network integrity. Preventive maintenance is performed from and coordinated by our NOCC during the day and after hours.

We have a unified command and operating philosophy. Our Network Operations Center is designed for optimum efficiency, and customer service. Unlike most companies, our customer support, engineering, and provisioning is directly integrated into one unified group that is dedicated to rapidly installing, or resolving any issue you may have.

Our NOCC and our process are specifically designed to avoid these common issues:

• Have you called customer support and found that the person did not have all of the tools immediately available to them to help troubleshoot your problem?


• Have you called customer support and found them to be far away from more senior engineers, and technicians, and they have to call you back or put you on hold to try and find someone to help them?


• Have you called a customer support, and found that you are calling a far off land, and that problem description and issue resolution is hard for the agent to grasp?

We have found that employees are happiest, and so are you, when we can quickly fix your issue. We have found that our employees are much happier, more productive, and are better able trained to help you, when they have direct access to the full set of tools. When you contact our customer support you are talking to a person that is highly experienced in managing, operating, and debugging networks and servers. Our customer support people are able to directly access our full network infrastructure to test your connections end-to-end.

Another advantage with ACD is that we, unlike many other companies, directly own nearly all infrastructure that we operate on, from our datacenter, fiber routes, and backbone infrastructure.