BellSouth today unveiled new Mid-Band Metro Ethernet Services that will make Ethernet access more available to smaller businesses and branch offices of larger businesses.

The new services have speed options of 2 Mb/s, 4 Mb/s and 8 Mb/s. BellSouth already offers Ethernet at speeds of 10 Mb/s and above going up to a 1 Gb/s service.

“These services let our smaller business customers move up to Ethernet access without having to move to fiber-based service, which may be cost-prohibitive for them,” said Nimesh Shah, senior director of data product management for BS business markets group. “Mid-based Ethernet is going to offer them SLAs [service level agreements] and performance guarantees. Additionally as we launch this service, we are launching it with class-of-service capabilities—there are four classes of service they can get over the access pipe.”

The CoS features enable companies to designed bandwidth for VoIP or other latency-sensitive services, or for higher priority data traffic.

BellSouth is using Hatteras Networks Ethernet over copper gear to offer the service. Two copper pairs are bonded to use G.SHSDL technology to reach the required bandwidth. The service is central office-based and can reach customers with 12,000 feet of the CO, Shah said.

BellSouth is seeing growing customer interest in Ethernet, Shah said. Small businesses may prefer Ethernet access over DSL, frame relay or other services because the private networking option delivers a higher quality of service.

“This is a success-based option,” he said. “We will roll it out as customers order it.”