CompTel: Ethernet bustin' out all over

Ethernet services at the CompTel/ASCENT trade show are proving as ubiquitous as gold, green and purple beads at Mardi Gras. But this year's Ethernet service comes with more sophisticated management tools and greater flexibility of deployment.

Seeking to woo CLECs interested in expanding their data service portfolios, BellSouth, Global Crossing and WilTel all introduced expanded Ethernet-based wholesale services with both pricing and feature improvements. Meanwhile, equipment vendor Hatteras Networks, which has been hawking copper-based Ethernet access gear, announced the first of what it says will be many rural telco customers.

BellSouth introduced Gigabit Ethernet as a wholesale service a year ago, product manager Terry Greene said, but its carrier customers began asking for more interfaces and more features. The result this year is two revamped Ethernet services and the promise of fully integrated Ethernet options within the coming year.

The current services break down into a Metro Ethernet offering that is a native mode service and an Ethernet over SONET product. The Metro Ethernet service is available in six different speeds and two different service levels--best effort and premium--according to product manager Jason Cook.

"Customers can get native mode service that is best effort, with no frills and low cost, or a premium service that is committed bandwidth" at speeds of 10 megabits per second, 20 Mbps, 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 250 Mbps or 500 Mbps, Cook said.

The Etherent over SONET services use BellSouth's Multi-Service Provisioning Platform (MSPP) SMARTRing Service to offer Ethernet at five different speeds (50 Mbps, 150 Mbps, 300 Mbps, 450 Mbps and 600 Mbps) with SONET protection and route diversity options.

"We will integrate the two services later this year," said Greene. "That will allow our customers to aggregate Metro Ethernet services" to a point of presence, collocation point or mobile serving office via a Gigabit Ethernet service that has SONET protection.

"We will be going to Layer 2 in 2006," he added. "So we can offer VLAN [virtual LAN] tagging, queue forwarding, and rate limiting to give our wholesale customers more control over the bandwidth they deliver."

The challenge, says Elliott Bryant, BellSouth senior director of marketing, is to achieve the interworking of legacy data services with Ethernet over the SONET infrastructure so that it is all transparent to customers. "And then we also have to get our internal costs down," he added, to make the service profitable for BellSouth.

Global Crossing's Ethernet IP service will enable its wholesale customers to offer LAN extensions across the wide area network, says Sian Cameron, senior director of carrier product management.

"This is an point-to-point IP service that is a cost-effective alternative to private line service," she said. "Pricing is usage-based so the carrier doesn't have to pay for a line that is not being fully utilized. This is a good option for ISPs that connect to peering sites."

WilTel launched a managed Ethernet WAN service, the latest in a series of managed services the company has delivered to its carrier customers.

"Within the last four to five months, we have introduced a managed security service, managed CPE, managed storage area networks with Nortel and EMC, and FocalPoint, which is a managed hub and spoke WAN," said Tony Tomae, senior vice president of marketing for WilTel. "This is the first nationwide Ethernet solution."

WilTel's service begins at the customer premises with the purchase of the on-premises Ethernet gear, which WilTel manages, and extends to the connecting premises.

"It's a full layer-2 service--we buy the equipment, install it and manage it--there's no capital cost to the customer," he said. "We manage the solution up to one Gigabit in speed, billed in one megabit increments."

WilTel also builds out a fiber network to the customer's data center and points of presence.

The Hatteras pitch has always been to service providers who don't have fiber links to their business customers and that message is resonating in an unexpected place, says Kevin Sheehan, Hatteras president and CEO. The company announced two rural carrier customers in Atlantic Telephone Membership Corp. and Wightman Telecom Ltd.

"Ethernet is getting hotter with the rural carriers," said Sheehan. "They can deploy the product to reach local government offices, doctors and medical facilities and schools, and then prove it in for other businesses."

Despite Ethernet's growing popularity, he says, service providers are having a hard time justifying the expense of running fiber to each customer's building in order to offer Ethernet.

"We see no sign of carriers willing to spend more for deep fiber laterals," Sheehan said.