Verizon adds L.A., Miami hubs to global network

Verizon Communications has filled two more holes in its global network, opening two new hubs to link the carrier’s planned international voice and data network to Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and South America.

Level 3 Communications announced today Verizon is leasing 3,500 square feet of combined space in its gateway centers in Miami and Los Angeles to house transmission and network interconnection equipment. The Los Angeles hub will serve as Verizon’s central communications hub for the western United States, connecting the network to western Canada, Asia and Mexico.

Verizon will also lease OC-3 capacity on Level 3’s long-haul fiber network to link the Los Angeles hub and its California long distance operations to its main international gateway in New York. The Miami hub will link the U.S. network to the Caribbean, other parts of Central America and South America.

Verizon fired up its New York gateway last month, switching all New York state international traffic onto its own networks. With the hubs in Miami and Los Angeles going online, Verizon will be able to offer an uninterrupted connection between Hong Kong and London, traveling over its former GTE networks in the pacific through Seattle and Los Angeles to New York and across the Atlantic. Verizon is also in the final testing phases of a fiber ring in Northern Europe, linking Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, said Rob Pilgrim, Verizon Global Solution Inc’s vice president for network engineering and operations.

The end-goal of the network is to offload all of Verizon’s long distance onto its own networks, saving it the cost of reselling capacity from another carrier, Pilgrim said. While international traffic is not problematic, domestic traffic will be a little trickier due to the long-distance restrictions imposed on the former Bell Atlantic properties. Different phases of the network are intended to coincide with its individual markets passing federal guidelines for long distance service, Pilgrim said.

“We’re building the network with that goal in mind,” Pilgrim said. “We want to carry all of that traffic – to be competitive we need to offer a one-stop shop to our customers.”

Verizon announced the mass-scale project in February, saying it planned to use the network to target large enterprises in its current local exchange territories. Verizon said 30 percent of the world’s Fortune 500 have their headquarters in Verizon’s territory, many of them in New York City, where Verizon has received permission to offer long distance. One of the challenges Verizon has faced in attracting large-scale enterprises on is its inability to offer global interconnection services.

Verizon has already established network links between New York and London, New York and Toronto, Seattle and Vancouver, Los Angeles and Mexico City, and from Honolulu to Hong Kong, Tokyo and Sydney. In the next two years, Verizon plans to complete direct links to other major commercial and financial centers, including Geneva, Zurich, Madrid, Singapore, Buenos Aires and Caracas. Much of the network infrastructure is coming from partners FLAG Telecom, which builds transatlantic and transpacific cable, and Metromedia Fiber Network, which builds and operates metro fiber networks domestically and abroad.

For Level 3, this is their first publicly announced agreement with a regional bell operating company, a welcome sign considering the financial state of Level 3’s previous customer base of competitive carriers, ISPs and Internet content companies. Level 3 did not release the dollar value of the contract.

“You’ll probably start to see more and more similar types of contracts,” a spokeswoman for Level 3 said. “We’re certainly looking toward more established traditional companies as a potential sources of revenue.”