Yipes across America

When a technology is hot, there's no such thing as sitting back to admire the scenery. The enthusiastically named Yipes Network (slogan: "Yipes! That's fast!") made news in February with its rollout of gigabit Ethernet LAN services over optical fiber in selected cities and their suburbs. That rollout continues; the company has reached nine U.S. cities and is slated to hit about 11 more this year.

Last week, Yipes announced that it can connect those metropolitan area network (MAN) dots and provide WAN connectivity that will letenterprise customers' data travel over secure, tunnelled IP links from one MAN to another.

Gigabit Ethernet bypasses bottlenecks, specifically those in the local phone switch, encountered by enterprises that use Sonet over ATM.

"When Ethernet was invented a quarter of a century ago, it was designed to be a standard that would link everybody to everybody, and it was licensed so widely that it's now ubiquitous," said Ron Young, Yipes' vice president of marketing and business development. "In the last five years, we've seen multiple orders of magnitude in speed increases, from Ethernet to fast Ethernet to gig-E, and by the end of this year, there'll be a draft standard for 10-gig Ethernet."

Those speed increases have been matched by a flood of new fiber construction, creating a super-fast backbone, and by advances in wave division multiplexing.

The speed problems come between the LAN and the backbone, Young said. "Your data leaves your office going nice and fast, hits the local phone company and turns into a snail, then takes off again when it reaches the backbone - until it hits the next phone company."

Yipes' MAN service keeps the data in Internet packets and puts it over Ethernet at Layer 2. This lets the company provide double the bandwidth for 80% of the traditional cost, Young said. It also lets the company supply any bandwidth needed, from 1 to 80 Mb/s, in 1 Mb/s increments - no waiting to make that leap from a T-1 to a DS-3 - with latency guarantees of 10 milliseconds across the MAN. Native Ethernet requires less equipment, and that means less information technology staff and lower operating costs.

The biggest catch so far has been that service has been limited to the cities in which Yipes has leased or deployed its fiber rings.

Yipes has solved that with an announcement that it will offer a managed virtual private network (VPN) solution between the MANs it now serves. The new service will be based on IP in Layer 3, encrypted with Triple-DES and authenticated with IPSec.

Yipes' WAN service offers the same scalability and economies that its MAN service does.

"With private line networks, you had to buy a circuit to every other potential site," said Eric Zines, director of product management for Yipes. "Frame relay made it a whole lot cheaper, but you still had an every-to-every meshing charge for private virtual circuits." IP is inherently meshed, so it's a linear cost growth for the customer to add additional sites because the customer just adds the site to the network with no meshing, he said.

MAN and WAN integrate easily, Zines said. Traffic from a location is sent via Ethernet to a Yipes gateway, which recognizes it as in-MAN and sends it out over fiber or judges it out-of-MAN - in which case, it's sent to the WAN gateway, encrypted and sent over IP.

The addition of managed WAN service is a necessary step if Yipes is to find any favor with large corporations, said Michael Kennedy, a co-founder of Network Strategy Partners. "Up till now, nothing in the IP VPN world was an appropriate replacement for a large corporate intranet," he said. "Yipes addresses security concerns with proper encryption levels and the use of virtual routers, and they're offering high performance."

Yipes offers a WAN availability guarantee, but the lack of an end-to-end latency guarantee still is going to disappoint large corporate clients, Kennedy said. But because Yipes is connecting its MANs via the big backbone providers - which commonly offer latency guarantees of their own - he doesn't think such end-to-end service level agreements are far off.

"From a cost point of view, there's a big incentive to adopt Ethernet services such as Yipes," Kennedy said. "There aren't enough Cisco engineers on earth to build all the private networks corporations need."