Velocity connects smaller business customers directly to fiber ring

Velocity Telephone Inc., a competitive carrier that offers service primarily in Minnesota, is taking a new approach to serving smaller business customers.

In the past, Velocity—like most competitive carriers—would have served those customers over a copper tail circuit leased from the incumbent carrier. Based on that network architecture, those customers typically could not afford more than a T-1 circuit—and if they want protection from network outages, they typically needed to purchase two circuits.

Velocity now aims to give smaller business customers higher bandwidth and a higher level of outage protection by connecting them directly to the company’s metropolitan fiber ring network—an option which, in the past, carriers have reserved primarily for only the largest business customers.

“When we have a major ring running through a community, we’re basically building smaller rings off of it,” Velocity President Jim Hickle told Connected Planet. “We’re going from business to business connecting them in a redundant pass. The only way it would go out of service would be to be cut on both sides.”

Velocity’s new offering enables smaller business customers to get 10 Mb/s of symmetrical Internet and voice service and save as much as 30% over what they were paying before for slower service based on T-1 lines, Hickle said.

A decrease in the cost of DWDM equipment has made the new network architecture feasible for Velocity where it might not have been in the past, said Hickle. In the future, the company expects to use the new architecture approach for all new builds—even in residential neighborhoods, where the company is beginning to install fiber to the home.

Hickle says that approach won’t be any more expensive, particularly after the cost of truck rolls is taken into account. Because Velocity’s new network architecture involves a higher level of redundancy, there should be fewer network outages.

Currently Velocity’s residential customers can obtain voice and high-speed data service. In the future the company expects to offer video services—and Hickle said the new architecture should have no trouble supporting that. The head-end would simply be another location on the ring. “You’re basically doing a 10 gig ring and multicasting,” Hickle said. “It’s almost identical to what [service providers are] doing anywhere else.”