* IXCs, LECs mingle in one another's territories
While the former regional Bell operating carriers continue winning approval to offer inter-local area and transport area services under section 271 of the Telecom Act of 1996, AT&T fired back last week with a one-two punch.
On the heels of Qwest gaining FCC approval to offer long-distance services in New Mexico, Oregon and South Dakota, AT&T said it is offering “last mile” local-access services to very large enterprise customers using its own SONET and dense wave division multiplexing network facilities in 67 U.S. metropolitan areas.
By no longer relying on arrangements with local-exchange carriers (LECs) to supply the access portion of a network service, AT&T says, it can now offer a standard guarantee of 99.999% network reliability for data, voice, and video services that span both the AT&T WAN “cloud” and the access network.
Traditionally, the access portion of the network has been AT&T’s Achilles’ heel. While WAN services are built on a backbone network of redundant routers and switches with alternate paths among them, organizations often purchase a single access link into that network to keep costs down. If something happens to that circuit, though, access to the WAN service is shut off.
AT&T’s new High Performance Access Service, a.k.a. HiPAS, targets the largest customers – business and government agencies with network connections at speeds between OC-3 (155M bit/sec) and OC-192 (10G bit/sec) – to ensure reliability for the most mission-critical applications. This is laudable, but it should be noted that organizations with such high-speed connectivity in support of run-the-business applications have likely already built in some sort of access-network protection, such as multihoming and distributed data centers. (And if they haven’t, shame on them!)
Increasingly, the vulnerability of branch offices – which are growing in number as organizations become increasingly distributed – is becoming more of an issue, because users, regardless of where they are, require equal access to corporate data and applications to remain productive.
However, the fact that AT&T is now running its own local-long distance network means it no longer has to pay local-access charges to LECs where its local business service is available. This means its cost of deploying service should eventually drop by the 40% of your interexchange carrier communications service costs that go to access fees paid by IXCs like AT&T to LECs like BellSouth, Qwest, SBC and Verizon.
