FACTS: Tar Heel State/Ranked 10th in population /Tree Pine /Capital Raleigh

Romance and danger surround the famed lighthouses of the North Carolina coast. From the Roanoke River to Bald Island, and along the Outer Banks, they continue to guide passing ships from disaster and wearied travelers home.

For centuries the waters along North Carolina's coastline proved treacherous to sailors and pirates alike. Lighthouses provided beacons of illumination. Among the most famous are the six along the Outer Banks.

Driving north past Duck and into Corolla you arrive at the Currituck Beach LightStation. Opened in 1875 its red brick exterior differs from the black and white patterned and whitewashed facilities to the south. Approximately one million bricks were used in building the still active lighthouse. From Easter to Thanksgiving weekend you can climb its 214 steps, walk around its grounds and peer in the Keeper's home. Maintained by the Outer Banks Conservationists a fee of $7.00 per person is required.

Heading south on Highway 12 through Kitty Hawk and Nags Head, and almost immediately at the entrance of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore – comes the Bodie Island Light. Pronounced "body," the name, according to long held rumors, came from either the large number of unfortunate drowning victims washed up on shore or the supposed original owners of the land – you decide.

The structure you now see is the classic case of "third time a charm". The first, built on a shaky unsupported brick foundation in 1847, once competed with the leaning tower of Pisa for most vertically challenged building. Abandoned within less than 15 years of its completion, the second lighthouse’s upright time was even less.

Two years to be exact. During the Civil War Confederate troops, fearful of its potential usefulness to oncoming Union naval ships, blew it up in 1861.

The shoreline remained dark, until the present lighthouse was completed in 1872. Now at 156’ high, the light from its black and white horizontal striped structure can be seen for 19 miles. Climbing the stairs it is not permitted, but the former the lighthouse keeper's house has been converted into a visitor's center and ranger’s station run by the National Park Service. Several adjacent nature trails provide excellent viewing of coastal marshland birds - like herons and Glossy ibis. Take a stroll.

The National Seashore protects the environment and its multiple creatures, for 70 miles, until the village of Ocracoke. Take time to explore quiet inlets, constantly changing sand dunes and perhaps spy the wild horses still roaming the islands.

The Diamond Shoals are anything but precious. The shallow and underwater sandbars, between Hatteras and Ocracoke, are ever moving. Combined with the convergence of the warm Gulf Stream and the Artic cold Labrador Current the region has a foreboding nickname – “Graveyard of the Atlantic.”

TIME WARNER REGION HONORED

The top engineer for Time Warner Cable Carolina Region accepted this year’s System of the Year Award at Wednesday’s luncheon.

The Carolina Region impressed the Communications Technology editorial team with its with its continuous push to improve technical operations, its willingness to test and embrace new technologies, and its smart approach to customer care and business services.

Carolina Regional VP Engineering Carl Newberry acknowledged the employees of this newly organized region of three divisions after accepting the crystal trophy on their behalf.

Tech ops strength

In a separate interview, Newberry discussed the regional imperative. "It's just difficult for a division to stand on their own any more," he said. "We’re all so interconnected."

The regional or Carolina network operations center (CNOC) is one element of this success story, according to Carolina Region Executive Vice President Carol Hevey.

"By pooling our resources and investing significantly in one location, we are able to create benefits for the entire region," Hevey said. "We have used the CNOC to refine our plant maintenance practices and make us much more responsive to outages. This has significantly improved our reliability and overall network quality and integrity."

Newberry, who previously headed up engineering in Columbia, said rolling out a single tool across the entire region was one of the ways that the CNOC has broken new ground.

"When we first started this a couple of years ago, there were multiple tools. Homegrown, invented in the garage, it was just everything," he said. "You could never get any consistency."

High on Newberry’s agenda was standardizing on a single platform, in this case, on the network service manager (NSM) from C-COR (now ARRIS.) Deployed across 95 percent of the region, he said that the NSM helps the CNOC accomplish two primary tasks.

The first is to drill down to root causes of problems in network devices. The second is to scour service calls to look for clustering and identify any common weak links. In either case, the CNOC’s analysts then guide system-level technicians working within 1-6 a.m. maintenance windows to address these issues.

"We try to fix those problems before we actually have to run a service call," Newberry said. "We cancel a lot of service calls that way."

Other examples of the Carolinas’ push to improve tech ops include its standardization on a single workforce management platform and continued investment in standby powering.

"We’re going deeper every year," Newberry said.

Other factors

Other factors weighed in favor of the Carolina Region:

• Its strong record as a test bed for new technologies, including the implementation of innovative customer relations tools
• Its deployment of network-driven advanced services (helping to win Time Warner’s Marketing and Sales Award)
• Its rapidly accelerating delivery of business services

The System of the Year Award, sponsored this year by Alcatel-Lucent, recognizes a system or group of systems whose achievements in broadband deployment and delivery of new services serve as a benchmark in the industry for technical capability, engineering expertise, and service.