Verizon today announced that just five months after announcing its plan to expand its high-speed data network, more than 150 of the company's largest business customers have signed contracts for advanced services provided over the network. The companies include Bank of New York and The PMA Insurance Group in Pennsylvania.
The expansion plan, dubbed Enterprise Advance, is a key part of Verizon's strategy to capitalize on new opportunities in the large business, or enterprise, data market and boost the revenue generated by the company's Enterprise Solutions Group.
Under the first phase of Enterprise Advance, which is now complete, Verizon put in place high-speed links throughout the Northeast, specifically to connect states such as New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, among others.
Verizon has combined its local service with more long-distance business offerings and advanced data services, such as optical networking and IP services, and is marketing them to Fortune 1000 corporations, governments, and finance, education and healthcare entities. In the first quarter of 2003, Verizon added long-distance connections in
the Northeast for regional frame relay, SONET and ATM. The services are now available across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Verizon Select Services Inc. provides Verizon's long-distance service.
Verizon, as it previously announced, plans to extend its services to more cities along the I-95 corridor in the East and then to cities across the country over the coming months. The extended Verizon network will support MPLS. The company is in the process of deploying a national MPLS backbone, a process it started in the second half of 2002. The goal, says Tom Roche, director of advanced networking services at Verizon Enterprise Solutions Group, is ultimately to offer interconnectivity among all of the company’s layer 2 services. Verizon has yet to name an MPLS vendor.
This theme of offering a variety of solutions over an IP backbone and the ability for legacy and newer services to be sewn together for the customer in a seamless fashion is clearly a path many carriers are pursuing or have already implemented. Cable & Wireless says it offers today LAN and WAN solutions that enable business to converge data, voice and video over a single network, as well as the ability for an IP VPN to interconnect with frame relay or ATM network through a gateway from CoSine Communications device. Time Warner Telecom plans to add frame relay to Ethernet interworking (along with IP Centrex, 10 gigabit Ethernet and cross-country connectivity) to its Ethernet portfolio in the second half of this year. And MCI, in laying out its 2003 product strategy this spring, said it is moving to a single IP core backbone. MCI also announced it is using an interworking gateway that will sit on its various data networks to enable customers to blend legacy and new services into what appears to the customer as a seamless solution to, for example, allow a customer to interconnect frame relay and IP VPN services.
As for Verizon, the company offers regional frame relay today, allowing customers to connect two LATAs without having having to go to a separate long-distance carrier to make those connections. Verizon plans to go national later this year or early next with national ATM service; it launched regional ATM in April. As for Ethernet, the company offers transparent LAN service and metro Ethernet as well as Ethernet over SONET services.
Transparent LAN services, available from Verizon at 10 and 100 mbps and gigabit Ethernet speeds, were introduced by the company in the third quarter of last year. The services are now available in 20 states, mostly in large metropolitan areas. “Customer demand for this is growing incredibly, with 36 percent growth in revenues of this service expected by the third quarter of 2003,” says Roche.
Despite a lot of talk in the industry about how Ethernet can cannibalize legacy data services, Roche doesn’t see Ethernet today as a direct competitor with its legacy services such as ATM, which offers constant bit rate (CBR) guarantees, because Ethernet as Verizon now sells it is a best-effort service. However, he adds, Verizon does offer mean-time-to-repair, on-time provisioning and other provisioning and maintenance guarantees on Ethernet. Some customers are looking for a CBR/quality of service equivalent to ATM for Ethernet, says Roche. In 2004, Verizon will look to embed QoS into Ethernet at a price point equivalent to frame relay service, he says. “We do see that is where the industry is moving,” adds Roche.
