Verizon Business is planning ambitious upgrades and additions to its service lineup this year, including rolling out nationwide Ethernet services that will offer customers the reliability of SONET, the routing control of legacy services and the flexibility of IP. In addition, the service provider plans to enhance its popular Private IP service offering.

Among the items on tap is a long awaited national Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), which Verizon plans to launch in the first half of 2007 using gear from Tellabs.

VPLS lets customers maintain control over their routes, much as they do with frame relay, but move their traffic to a fully meshed MPLS network. This Layer 2 technology, based on IETF draft specifications, is viewed as the logical migration path for legacy frame relay users.

“We now have the capability to offer a national VPLS service that will support networking at Layer 2,” says Tom Roche, vice president of marketing for network voice and data services at Verizon. Customers will be able to use the same LAN signaling over a national network with full control over routing, he says.

“VPLS is a very important capability for legacy Verizon Business customers,” says Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research. Many customers are not in a position to upgrade their routers to support Layer 3 VPN services, she says. VPLS allows these users to move to a more flexible Layer 2 option.

Click to see: WAN Ethernet holding its own

Pierce points out customers interested in adding voice and video to their VPN in the future will eventually need to move to a Layer 3 service. Nonetheless, she expects “this service to be appealing to an awful lot of customers.”

Verizon Business has been slow to adopt VPLS on a national level -- but it isn’t the only large service provider to drag its heels. AT&T has been working to extend its VPLS offering to more metro networks outside its local 13-state market, but customers will have to wait until 2008 for a national offering, AT&T says.

In the mean time, AT&T began setting up dedicated Ethernet connections between separate VPLS metro markets last month, says Bob Walters, executive director of metro data at AT&T.

But AT&T’s temporary solution for out-of-region connectivity is only applicable for very large deployments, because the dedicated connectivity between sites is in the multi gigabit range, Forrester’s Pierce says. “This wouldn’t be a solution for an insurance company looking to connect 300 remote offices,” she says.