Verizon Business, which says its Private IP service is growing like gangbusters, has made a variety of coverage and feature improvements to the MPLS-based offer.
The service is now available in 121 countries. Recent key node installations were made in Malaysia, Thailand, Slovakia, Russian Federation, Turkey, South Africa, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam and Slovenia. The company also has added nodes in its existing served locations of Barcelona, Spain; Sao Paulo, Brazil and Calgary, Alberta; and completed a four-city node expansion in Perth, Brisbane, Canberra and Adelaide in Australia. Meanwhile, the company now reaches customers with its Private IP service in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, and its node in Helsinki, Finland.
And Verizon Business is partnering with other carriers to extend its coverage in certain areas. New coverage areas that fit this description are in Central America (via a partnership with Navega), Alaska (in partnership with GCI), extended areas of Canada (care of Telus) and Japan (through a deal with Japan Telecom).
In other Private IP news from Verizon Business, the company has expanded on its “Application Aware” reporting capabilities by providing business customers with more customization options. For example, Private IP customers now can generate customized ad hoc reports, save them as templates and schedule these reports to run automatically. And network points of interest can be groups for customized reporting and monitoring. Also new is a test feature to ensure routers are correctly set up for SNMP polling and a feature that allows customers to receive notification when thresholds for service performance are exceeded.
And speaking of service performance and SLAs, Verizon Business also announced it offers individual time to repair SLAs for Private IP, as opposed to its previously available mean time to repair, which averaged repairs over a year. The company did a similar thing with its improved network transit delay SLA – now using city-to-city based latency metrics instead of the previous country averages for all non-U.S. locations.
Also, a new Site Availability-Dual Port SLA is now offered for customers that utilize the Disaster Recovery Port feature with Router Diversity and redundant local access. And customers providing their own local access can now take advantage of certain Verizon Business SLAs.
Finally, Verizon Business now offers six class of service prioritization options rather than the previously available five. Customers can mark their traffic using these CoS options as they see fit, but the new CoS option – AF1 – is aimed at bulk data-type applications.
Verizon Business said it continues to improve its Private IP as the service continues to see tremendous growth. Revenue from the service has doubled year over year, even from 2005 to 2006 after the company built up a good number of customers. Private IP customer VPNs have increased by 49 percent in the past 12 months, while the number of Private IP customer ports is up 64 percent in the past 12 months.
Verizon Business www.verizonbusiness.com
