World Wide Packets lands UK deal

World Wide Packets said Telewest Business, the commercial arm of UK cable operator Telewest will use its LightningEdge platform to deploy a nationwide Ethernet service.

Telewest Business already provides advanced Ethernet services to organizations in metropolitan areas. With the World Wide Packets platform, though, the company will expand that into a national offering. Like many carriers in the U.S. launching Ethernet, Telewest Business is targeting enterprises that either want to consolidate infrastructure or replace ATM/frame networks.

For World Wide Packets, the contract is another piece of evidence that its active Ethernet solution is gaining traction. The company has been finding its greatest success in countries where incumbents still are dominant providers of data services, said Barry Kantner, vice president of marketing.

"The market in the UK has been very good because there is no alternative besides BT," he said. "There’s a huge pent-up demand."

Telewest Business’ nationwide service will provide virtual LANs to every customer. From a network perspective, the carrier will use World Wide Packets’ LightningEdge Network Supervisor to provide management and provisioning.

Telewest Business currently offers Ethernet in three flavors, 10 Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and Gigabit. With the new platform, the company could theoretically offer the service in increments of 1 Mb/s. However, according to Kantner, most carriers have been starting with 10 Mb/s as the basic service and moving up in large increments.

"We see the 10 meg point as a sweet entry point," he said "There are some applications like storage area networking where you’ll want to be up in the gigabit range but the majority [of early adopting enterprises] are in the 250 Mb/s to 500 Mb/s area."