* Former MCI reworks business service network
Verizon Business, the former MCI, is making several enhancements to its network in an effort to better support next-generation services for enterprises.
This summer, Verizon Business will implement pseudowires, a technique in which legacy data access circuits like frame relay and ATM are encapsulated in Ethernet for transmission through an IP/MPLS core. This will reduce costs for enterprise customers as well as help migrate them to Ethernet, which Verizon Business considers to be the successor to private lines.
Later this year, Verizon Business plans to boost bandwidth on one to three routes in its ultra-long haul backbone to 40Gbps from 10Gbps. The upgrade was trialed last year on a route between San Francisco and San Jose in which 10Gbps and 40Gbps wavelengths were supported on the same fiber carrying HDTV video conferences, gaming, music downloads, VoIP and hundreds of simultaneous video streams.
The Verizon Business backbone can support 80 40Gbps wavelengths. But even though 40Gbps is not yet rolled out, Verizon Business is already looking past that to 100Gbps and 160Gbps.
The carrier hopes to increase backbone bandwidth to 100Gbps or 160Gbps in the next two or three years while maintaining the 80 wavelength capacity.
Another enhancement to come early next year will be flow-through provisioning, in which customers will be able to turn up new circuits or increase bandwidth in real-time vs. waiting two to three weeks for those new services. For example, users will be able to go from 100Mbps to 1Gbps in a matter of minutes.
Flow-through provisioning will also reduce access and operational costs for Verizon Business, savings that could conceivably be passed on to enterprise customers.
