WorldCom beefs up and retools network

Despite its financial woes, WorldCom is still making adjustments and improvements to its network. Today the provider revealed that it is implementing a new network management tool called Dedicated Analysis that provides dedicated Internet monitoring for its customers.

Additionally, WorldCom is equipping some of its infrastructure with gear to help customers with bandwidth demands greater than T1 but who can’t rationalize the jump to a T3. The Dedicated Analysis tool enables customers to monitor performance down to the access level and it will be offered to customers with T1s, OCn service, Ethernet or NxT1 connections to UUNet’s backbone. The network monitoring capabilities involve network statistics such as latency and packet loss.

“Customers like going to the Web interface to see information on the network, but they want to see down to the premises,” said Ralph Montfort, director of access product marketing.

The new monitoring capabilities are the result of a partnership with Visual Networks and actually expand on an earlier release involving customers with multiple remote users, which provides dial analysis. To breach the T1 to T3 gap, WorldCom is deploying customer premises equipment from Tasman Networks to aggregate multiple T1s using the multilink frame relay standard. By doing so, customers can combine two to eight T1 lines at one location.

Before its agreement with Tasman, Montfort said WorldCom was relegated to proprietary Cisco equipment that didn’t perform true load balancing and was based on express forwarding. And with older solutions, if one T1 went down, others were likely to do the same.

“This equipment is very cost-effective for us and our customers,” Montfort said. “It works out to the same price for three to eight T1s as it was for one T1,” he said.

For WorldCom, the upgrade went commercial six weeks ago and just involves dropping in a new card.