A LAW FIRM THAT counts some of the country's top high-tech companies as customers cannot afford to let bandwidth limitations place a stranglehold on its productivity.

Fenwick & West -- a Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm specializing in intellectual property protection and legal guidance on mergers and acquisitions for software companies and other high-tech clients -- found that it was quickly outgrowing the 1.5Mbps T1 line it used for connecting to the Internet and to its e-mail service.

The firm has roughly 650 employees spread over three locations, the bulk of which are in the Palo Alto office, with 50 people in an office in San Francisco and another 20 in Washington.

Although Fenwick & West's Washington location had its own frame-relay connection to the Internet, the San Francisco and Palo Alto offices shared one T1 line coming out of Palo Alto for all access to the Internet and e-mail.

According to Matthew Kesner, CIO at Fenwick & West, the firm's large number of high-tech clients put great weight on having a speedy data connection. This demand added to the heavy bandwidth required for daily tasks such as Internet-based research, e-mail correspondence, and bulky file transfers.

"Often our lawyers have to download prerelease products from software companies or download whole Web sites, often of our clients' competitors," Kesner says. "A lot of the work in research has to do with copying down sites, viewing video, and [listening to] audio."

The Palo Alto and San Francisco locations were doing all this over a single T1 line, and the firm had outgrown the connection and needed something more, Kesner says.

In addition, the firm was running into big problems because the ISP had limited the size of e-mail attachments to 5Mb. This meant that Fenwick & West had to set up alternative means for receiving large documents and files from clients and other colleagues.

"The limitation [on e-mail attachment size] was becoming an issue on a daily basis," Kesner says.

The firm was also expanding rapidly, finalizing plans to add 100 employees to the San Francisco office. Kesner knew they needed more bandwidth, but after talking to numerous telecommunications carriers, he was not satisfied with either the few options available or the steep prices.

"We talked to all the major telecom carriers. They suggested a DS3 or OC3 as the two options. It seemed like those two options were a huge step up in bandwidth -- much more than we needed," Kesner says.

Because the carriers

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