* MCI, Equant, ISPs make news
In this newsletter, we’d like to summarize a few of the more interesting recent developments on the carrier and ISP front.
* MCI has layered its MCI Advantage VoIP services onto its Private IP VPN service. This means that customers using Private IP – which allows frame relay or ATM access to MCI’s IP VPN WAN service – can now also use these same connections to access their VoIP services.
* MCI also introduced a no-charge service-level agreement (SLA) for denial-of-service attack resolution to all its IP services. The SLA reportedly guarantees a response to suspected denial-of-service attacks within 15 minutes of a customer-generated trouble ticket.
Side note from us: MCI is a Cisco Powered Network (CPN) provider. Cisco routers have a black-hole filtering capability that allows traffic destined for a particular Web server to be redirected to an invalid interface (an address known as “Null0”), where packets are simply discarded. This capability is typically used to alleviate denial-of-service attacks on service provider customers’ Web servers. You might ask MCI (or other Cisco-based IP carrier you might be using) about using black-hole filtering to minimize the impact of denial-of-service attacks.
* Hallelujah! Four major U.S. ISPs – AOL, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo – are suing more than 220 alleged spammers responsible for sending out hundreds of millions of pieces of unsolicited e-mail. The ISPs filed six lawsuits last week under the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) law.
* Global carrier Equant recently introduced two satellite services aimed at multinationals, particularly those with hard-to-reach sites in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Dedicated Satellite Access reportedly allows customers to extend existing Equant packet data services using satellite leased-line services at speeds from 64K to 2M bit/sec in 100 countries. IP Satellite Access is said to provide shared satellite VPN access over a packet-switched satellite network with capacity shared between all sites (so it costs less). The carrier says this service operates at committed speeds of 16K to 256K bit/sec, burstable to 2M bit/sec, and is scheduled for worldwide availability next month.
