MCI Inc. unveiled two global Ethernet solutions at Interop: Global Data Link Ethernet (GDLE) Services, and Ethernet Access to Private IP, MCI’s MPLS IP VPN service.
GDLE is an end-to-end private line service with Ethernet onramps available from the States to several European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, Private IP customers now can opt for frame, ATM, IP or Ethernet access in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
The benefit for the customer of providing Ethernet access for VPNs and private line services is the ability to use all-IP from the LAN to the WAN to the core, says Michael Marcellin, director of VPN and data services product management at the carrier. That means businesses can aggregate multiple services, such as Internet access, private line and VPNs, which each required its own discrete access lines at the customer premises in the past. With Ethernet, all can run over one set of CPE and one access link. “We see the access portion as a critical part of our IP strategy going forward,” says Marcellin.
Ethernet access also provides flexibility in bandwidth increments. One link can potentially provide 100mbps of bandwidth to a customer; the amount can be scaled up or down up by the megabit up to that threshold without a truck roll. Also, SLAs matching that of the carrier’s SONET offerings are available.
“This is more cost-effective for us to deliver, and we pass those savings on to the customer,” says Marcellin. “And virtually all businesses can benefit from this portfolio by aggregating existing IP-based services.”
MCI says the new Ethernet data services are particularly ideal for companies in the financial, healthcare, entertainment and education industries, especially those required to meet new industry regulations for data replication and archiving, and the support of new online applications.
The offerings will be available on-net via MCI's fiber-lit buildings and off-net in select locations beginning in July. They complement the local-to-national Ethernet capabilities MCI announced last July, including U.S. Private Line Ethernet Services to connect business locations nationwide, Metro Private Line Ethernet Services to connect business sites within the same region, MCI Storage Transport Service to enable companies to more easily implement storage area networking solutions, and Internet Dedicated Ethernet Service to allow companies to connect to the Internet using very high bandwidth, ranging from 1mbps to 1gbps.
The new services deliver on the carrier’s Converged Packet Access (CPA) technology trials also announced today, which allow businesses to use a single access network for multiple services. Today, most customer access is TDM, which requires separate access lines for each service (voice, video, data, or Internet) along with rigid bandwidth boundaries. Any change, addition or move requires numerous manual touch points, making it labor intensive. CPA relies on virtual connections to the customer, converging all applications to a packet access network. CPA reduces the number of pieces of equipment on the network, the number of interfaces, back office systems and touch points, enables an end-to-end view for provisioning and network management, and allows incremental services to be added while simplifying CPE, says MCI.
A first customer is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc., and MCI plans to launch its CPA architecture in 24 additional cities by the end of the year, including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C./Baltimore.
