BellSouth offers ‘premium’ metro Ethernet

BellSouth broadened its metro Ethernet portfolio this week with a suite of "premium" services meant to give customers more variety and control of their metro Ethernet networks as well as enable more sophisticated applications than those for which traditional best-effort services were intended.

Instead of choosing between traditional best-effort offerings of 10, 100 and 1000 Mb/s, BellSouth customers can now buy metro Ethernet service at speeds of 20, 50, 250 and 500 Mb/s.

"A lot of times traditionally, customers would just throw bandwidth at the problem," said BellSouth’s Director of Emerging Transport Solutions Suzy Gray. "I may only need a small amount of throughput, but I’ll provision a gig. Even if there’s contention on the network, if I throw a gig at the problem, odds are it will go through."

Instead, customers can also purchase service level agreements (SLAs) for the new offerings aimed at enabling more sophisticated services such as voice and video over IP, business continuity and data and storage center connectivity. SLAs for the new premium services guarantee 99.9% network availability, latency of 55 milliseconds or less and mean time to repair of four hours. Customers can also opt to prioritize traffic using 802.1p-based low-latency queues, ideal for latency-sensitive applications such as video.

BellSouth began selling the new premium services in April and won’t say how many customers it has so far. The services will be initially available in Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Jacksonville and Raleigh, but four more unnamed cites are targeted for the rest of 2004.