Yipes Enterprise Services, a leader in fully managed Ethernet services, Tuesday announces new class-of-service capabilities to directly compete against rival VPN providers.

The CoS offering allows customers to prioritize their traffic over Yipes’ global network, which covers 20 countries in four continents including all of North America and parts of Europe and Asia.

Differentiated CoS will be useful for VoIP and video conferencing applications, Yipes says.

"We have very strong [service-level agreements]. When you match CoS with our highly reliable network, we think that’s significant," says Keao Caindec, chief marketing officer with Yipes.

Caindec says customers can use Yipes’ CoS offerings with similar class of service offerings available for MPLS services to create hybrid networks that prioritize critical applications from one end to another.

Yipes’ Layer 2 services run over an MPLS backbone. Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) is an MPLS application that allows geographically dispersed sites to share an Ethernet broadcast domain.

"VPLS provides the reliability, security and ease of use of Ethernet along with the scalability, multipoint-to-multipoint support and resiliency of MPLS," Yipes said in a statement.

Yipes said it was the first carrier to offer class of service over a VPLS based network. Yipes is offering four classes of services over its Ethernet-based Layer 2 VPLS VPNs.

Yipes argues that its Layer 2 VPLS services are higher-performing, easier to deploy and less expensive than rival Layer 3 VPNs. Yipes customers can provision service over copper and fiber, which also lowers costs.

"The biggest trend that we are seeing in the market is this migration away from Frame Relay and ATM to Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNS, MPLS as well as Ethernet networks," Caindec says.

"Companies in disparate offices are coming together using collaboration tools such as VoIP and video conferencing," Caindec added. "Those collaboration tools are creating needs that can’t be satisfied by the existing network, and so they are adopting network services with any-to-any connectivity. And there are two alternatives: IP MPLS-based networks or VPLS Ethernet."

Yipes says one of the key issues holding back VPLS Ethernet services was the lack of CoS. That’s why this announcement is so important, Caindec says.