Exclusive: Verizon previews 2007 services road map

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.

Nationwide VPLS services are available, meanwhile, from Masergy, Time Warner Telecom, Yipes and Broadwing (which Level 3 acquired early this month). Sprint has no plans to introduce VPLS, but it does have a Layer 2 alternative, called SprintLink, that has been available for three years and is based on Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, an IETF draft specification.

Ethernet advances

One area Verizon won’t be playing catch-up to other carriers is implementing Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) services.

Verizon’s service expansion plans include a new Ethernet Packet Ring Service, due to launch in February, that’s based on the RPR standard, IEEE 802.17.

“Resilient Packet Ring promises the benefits of SONET with a much more flexible interface,” Pierce says. “Theoretically customers can use bandwidth more efficiently while getting the resiliency of SONET.”

Pierce says Verizon is one of the first service providers rolling out an RPR service. “It’s a very new technology.”

Wireless-to-wireline integration is another priority in 2007 for Verizon, which plans to link its Evolution Data Optimized (EV-DO) wireless data services with its flagship Private IP MPLS VPN service.

“The traffic will never traverse the [public] Internet,” Roche says. Customers will have a “very secure” connection from using Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO service as an access technology, he says.For more details, see related story.

Roche says the service provider also plans to better integrate its Private IP services with local network assets throughout Verizon’s traditional local service area. The carrier is “making significant investments” in converged packet access nodes and connectivity into its local services, Roche says. “This will translate into better prices.”

Lastly, Verizon will add a sixth class-of-service level to its Private IP service, Roche says. Today the company allows customers to divvy up their traffic into five different classes. The additional class is on the low end of the spectrum and will allow customers to better prioritize traffic such as e-mail and Web surfing. Roche says the carrier is not deploying new gear or software to support the sixth class of service, but is instead activating this capability over its MPLS network.