AboveNet adds slower, cheaper connections

AboveNet has launched three lower cost, lower bandwidth “Lite” versions of its existing IP and metro Ethernet services, the company announced Wednesday.

AboveNet’s new Metro Ethernet Lite service, which ranges in speed from 20 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s, is a lower cost version of its existing Metro Ethernet service, which ranges from 100 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s. The new Metro IP Lite service offers 20 Mb/s or 50 Mb/s of IP-based Internet access service (bursting up to 100 Mb/s), a step down from the 100 Mb/s (bursting up to 1 Gb/s) of the company’s existing Metro IP service. And whereas the nationwide EWAN service launched last October ranges in speed from 50 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s, the new Lite version ranges from 20 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s of Fast Ethernet.

The offers were originally tailored for a few specific customer requests, but the broad demand AboveNet saw for them convinced the company to launch the services in all its 14 markets last Friday. Targeting large and medium-sized businesses, especially those with remote office connectivity needs, AboveNet expects to sell 10 to 15 of the new services each month.

“We had a bunch of customers come to us and say, ‘We like the idea of [the earlier services], but we only have 20 Mb/s of requirement, not 50 or 100, and we don’t want to pay for what we’re never going to use,’” said Rick Battle, AboveNet’s marketing director.

All three services use Catalyst 3550 switches from Cisco Systems at the customer premises.