There's nothing local about this LAN

Verizon Business this week expanded its Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) across the world, taking a local area network technology and making it global.

The VPLS service is now available across Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and North America. Verizon points out that a global company could use the network for voice, video and data applications across those distant locations.

Verizon was the first major provider to go nationwide with a VPLS service back in 2007. At the same time, the huge federal government contract for Networx required VPLS, which observers saw as a big validation for the emerging technology. 

With VPLS, a company’s multiple LANs connect to the edges of a provider’s network, and the provider bridges them over IP/MPLS as a single domain in a Layer 2 VPN. To the customer, the WAN looks like an Ethernet switch. As Verizon points out, customers retain control over their own routing, and the service can support both IP and non-IP applications.

Countries included in this week’s expansion include the U.K., France, Germany, India, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. Verizon says its network interconnects with those of regional Ethernet providers to bring the service to those locations.

Verizon’s VPLS supports different classes of service, so that certain applications or time-sensitive voice and video traffic can be given a higher priority through the network. The bandwidth to a customer can be provisioned from 1 Mbps to 1Gbps and up.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.