Core router, multiservice edge projects finalized in Q3
CHICAGO — Verizon Business will announce vendors it has selected for its converged core router architecture and its next-generation multiservice access edge in the third quarter, according to officials interviewed at the NXTcomm conference here.
Verizon Business has had an RFP out for a few years on the converged core router. The carrier has been looking for a system that can consolidate its five separate IP networks into the same box with virtual segmentation and 100% availability.
The multiservice edge project will essentially be the next-generation Converged Packet Access (CPA) architecture, said Fred Briggs, executive vice president of network operations and technology at Verizon Business. CPA converges multiple services — IP, Ethernet, private line data and voice — over a single Ethernet interface for access to an IP/MPLS core at speeds up to 1Gbps.
The multiservice edge will extend access interfaces beyond Ethernet, Briggs said.
These projects fall under Briggs’ network technology priorities for this year, which include 100% availability, flow-through provisioning, predictable latency and accurate billing.
For availability and predictable latency, Verizon Business is extending its optical mesh technology onto three routes in the Pacific Ocean, Briggs said. It is on seven routes in the Atlantic and it helped Verizon Business maintain uptime on its Private IP VPN service during the devastating earthquake in Taiwan late last year.
The carrier plans to deploy the optical mesh across the United States in the second half of this year.
“One of the big drivers is latency,” Briggs said, as are better restoration, higher availability and predictable performance.
The carrier’s vendors for the optical mesh are Ciena, with its CoreDirector product, and Alcatel-Lucent’s LambdaUnite system.
Verizon Business is also turning up its 40Gbps route between New York and Washington, D.C. It will trial 100Gbps next year, Briggs said.
The carrier stopped short of saying if or when 40G might become a service.
“It’s got to make commercial sense,” said Nancy Gofus, senior vice president and chief marketing officer. Demand for 10G services has been relatively small, the Verizon Business officials said.
For flow-through provisioning, Verizon Business plans to deploy Tellabs reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers in the second half of this year. The 1.6Tbps systems will help Verizon Business provision high-bandwidth services without truck rolls, Briggs said.
The carrier plans to build out its flow-through provisioning capabilities incrementally through 2009.
For accurate billing, Briggs predicted credits associated with erroneous charges will be reduced dramatically next year.
“Credits will be cut by half by the end of 2008,” he said.
The carrier hopes to achieve this goal by reducing the number of billing systems in operation. Today Verizon has 30 billing systems — that number will be reduced to three or four, Gofus said. Some of the systems will “rust away” rather than be turned off and users migrated.
Briggs also described a new method for entering contract information into the billing systems where the contract itself becomes the input. While he recognizes this would not eliminate all billing errors because sometimes the contract itself is wrong, it will reduce human error.
“Two or three [billing systems] have already been turned off this year,” he said..
Gofus said the billing system consolidation is an 18 month project where 98% of customers will all be on a few billing systems.
Verizon’s challenging billing situation is not new, nor is exclusive to this carrier. Every carrier delivers incorrect bills to customers daily. And this inaccurate billing has created a huge telecom expense management (TEM) industry where businesses spent $550 million on such tools last year, according to consulting firm Gartner.
Last year Verizon threw its hat into the TEM services arena announcing its own managed TEM offering that’s supported by Symphony Services.
Separately, Verizon says it has signed its first national VPLS contract, but it is not at liberty to divulge the customer’s name. Verizon is the only of the big three carriers offering a national VPLS service, which it launched in March.
Gofus said Verizon will introduce VPLS overseas “not before 2008.”
AT&T has put its offering on hold until next year and is only offering a metro VPLS service in legacy SBC territories. Sprint Nextel does not have plans to deploy a VPLS offering, instead offering its SprintLink service, based on Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol, as an alternative.
Nationwide VPLS services are available, meanwhile, from Masergy, Time Warner Telecom, Yipes and Broadwing, which Level 3 acquired early this year.
Verizon has also been slower than expected bringing its wireless to Private IP integration a reality. Earlier this year the carrier said it expected to offer Evolution Data Optimized (EV-DO) wireless data service access to its flagship Private IP MPLS VPN a priority for 2007.
But Gofus said she doesn’t expect Verizon to support EV-DO to Private IP until late this year or early next year.
