Carriers expand south of the border

AT&T, Verizon Business and Virtela are reporting booming sales in Latin and South America

Latin and South America are muy caliente for service providers.

AT&T, Verizon Business and Virtela are reporting booming sales in the region during the last 12 months, as U.S. multinationals expand their manufacturing and sales operations there.

AT&T last week said that it will spend $750 million to beef up its global network for corporate customers in several fast-developing areas including Latin America.

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Latin and South America are muy caliente for service providers.

AT&T, Verizon Business and Virtela are reporting booming sales in the region during the last 12 months, as U.S. multinationals expand their manufacturing and sales operations there.

AT&T last week said that it will spend $750 million to beef up its global network for corporate customers in several fast-developing areas including Latin America.

AT&T’s plans follow a recent announcement by Verizon Business that it had improved its service-level agreements (SLA) for customers of its managed WANs in Latin and South America. The new SLAs are available in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

Verizon Business officials said the new SLAs are geared toward U.S. companies that are locating manufacturing and R&D facilities in Latin America.

"We are seeing significant growth in Latin America," says Cliff Cibelli, senior manager of Managed WAN-LAN Services for Verizon Business. Among the Verizon Business customers that will benefit from the new SLAs in Latin America are ABN Amro.

"What enterprise customers are looking for is consistent metrics across a region," Cibelli says. "They don’t want to necessarily deal with one SLA in Brazil and another in Chile. They want it to be uniform. They are used to a pretty high level of service in the United States. These new numbers [in Latin America] get us closer to what we have in the United States."

Virtela is seeing more than 20% growth in Latin and South American sales of its DSL, IP VPN and MPLS services compared to last year. Among the countries that are growing fastest are Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile, Virtela says.

"Our Latin American business has surged in the past 12 months," says Arturo Leon, Senior Manager Global Access for Virtela. "We’ve seen great interest from multinationals and that coincides with a maturing infrastructure for the independent service providers in the region that we partner with."

Virtela’s customers in the region include Shaklee, a California provider of natural foods and household cleaners with a sizeable operation in Mexico.

Improved service in Latin and South America is good news for enterprise network managers, who have found it challenging in the past to get high-quality service. That’s one reason companies prefer to buy managed network services in the region.

"It comes down to reliability," Leon says. "Historically, the infrastructure in this region is not what companies are accustomed to in North America. They have to rely on a service provider to deal with the cultural, economic and technological differences in these countries."

Verizon Business’ improved SLAs in the region apply to actual time to repair and network availability. The new actual time to repair SLA is four hours, and the network availability guarantee SLA is 99.5% for customers without network backup. Customers with single router back-up have SLAs of 99.95% and customers with dual router-dual circuit architecture have SLAs of 100%.