Out of chaos will come desirable new services

By Johna Till Johnson
Network World, 10/22/01

Two weeks ago, we covered the challenges facing service providers (and their customers) in an imploding telecommunications market. Now it's time to look on the bright side.

The pressure on carriers to increase revenue is driving them to roll out lower-cost, higher-performance services, which can prove a boon to companies. Here's a sampling of service offerings on the horizon.

A smorgasbord of IP VPN services. Virtually every service provider has either just rolled out an IP VPN service or has a blueprint for one on the books.

IP VPNs come in a variety of flavors (IP Security, Multi-protocol Label Switching, and network-based, to name just a few) and provide companies with alternatives for connecting to remote users, remote offices, outside organizations or all of the above.

Marketing hype aside, IP VPNs provide a main advantage over conventional services such as frame relay and ATM: flexible bandwidth with reliable service quality. Unlike frame relay services, which effectively top out at 1.5M bit/sec, IP VPN services are available at speeds ranging from 25K bit/sec to OC-48. And IP VPNs can be engineered to provide effectively the same quality of service (QoS) that's available across ATM (which, incidentally, doesn't work well at speeds of less than 1.5M bit/sec).

Bottom line: At long last, IP VPN services are gearing up to be ready for prime time.

WAN and metropolitan Ethernet services. The idea here is to provide companies with Layer 2 Ethernet interfaces that effectively extend the LAN across the MAN and WAN. Yes, it's been tried less than successfully before (remember when MFS rolled out the first "transparent LAN service" across ATM in the early 1990s?), but there are indications the market is ready for these services this time.

Most companies have robust 100M bit/sec-to-Gigabit Ethernet infrastructures in the LAN - compared with the considerably more heterogeneous environments a decade ago - making Ethernet WAN services a logical extension of the LAN infrastructure. Also, applications such as remote storage and disaster recovery can make effective use of the bandwidth.

Still to be determined: the real value proposition of Layer 2 services that lack native QoS compared with Layer 3 services.

Off-net provisioned services. Several companies, including Interprovider in the U.K., are working on products that will let service providers provision services delivered on another provider's facilities.

Why would a carrier want to do this?

Simple: for customer retention. Say a service provider has an enterprise customer who needs connectivity to cities not served by that provider.

Today the provider has two choices: Decline the business or arrange an agreement with another provider, typically via a network-to-network interface (NNI). NNI-based interconnects tend to adversely affect service quality, and carrier-to-carrier agreements have a way of falling apart - witness the formal dissolution of the AT&T/British Telecom partnership earlier this month.

A solution circumventing these difficulties would keep both companies and service providers happy.