NASHVILLE--Verizon Partner Solutions, the company’s wholesale arm, today announced a new Verizon Integrated Optical Service that incorporates ROADM capabilities into nodes or access points to enable a much wider variety of service offerings from a single point.

The ROADM – or reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer – capabilities allow service providers to offer services from DS-1s to Sonet at speeds up to OC-192, to Ethernet at speeds of 10 Mb/s up to 10 Gb/s on an easier, more cost-effective basis, said Andrew Mendez, Sonet product line manager for Verizon Partner Solutions.

“It converges DWDM [dense wave-division multiplexing] with Sonet, data packet services and Ethernet,” Mendez said. “It replaces what would have been five to seven bays of equipment with one single bay. We will have the facilities to provide a ring-on-ring service or a point-to-point service, but it is all on one more compact platform, which consumes less real estate, reduces power consumption, and is easier to manage and maintain.”

The new service will also feature less complex billing, since customers will no longer be billed for multiple technologies. Instead, they will be billed for an IOS network, with one node charge per location, one total ring mileage charge and rider charges. That will be greater economies for wholesale customers, Mendez said. “This reduces billing elements from as many as seven to as few as three,” he said.

Still to come are multi-degree nodes, which will enable Verizon to use mesh topologies for self-healing services, instead of rings, Mendez said. Adding intelligence to the network and making it control-plane enabled means the network will determine the survivable path in the event of an outage or fiber cut. “Today, for bandwidth on demand, it’s a one-to-one service that needs a dedicated path and an alternate path, and the customer pays for those,” Mendez said. “going forward, we will be able to provide the customer with one network design and the system switches automatically to an alternate path, which reduces costs for the customer.”

The new offering is just part of a concerted effort that Verizon Partner Solutions is making to attract wholesale customers by making business easier to do, said Kathleen McLean, senior vice president of sales.

“We are bringing the power of Verizon and its engineering and its relationships with its vendors to bear for the wholesale market,” McLean said.

“We want to be their optical provider of choice,” added Tom Caldwell, vice president of marketing and product management. “We are working hard to do a better job in the wholesale market and I think you can see it in several tangible ways. There has been a shift of resources.”

The key change, Caldwell said, was to focus the wholesale group more on customer needs.

Verizon Partner Solutions is the biggest vendor at Comptel, with the largest block of meeting rooms at the show.