BellSouth today added new classes of service to its Metro Ethernet offering, creating Virtual BellSouth Metro Ethernet Service, designed to meet specific business needs.

The new service offering enables customers to designate traffic into four different classes of service – best-effort, business critical, interactive and real-time – each of which come with different routing priorities. The different class types can then be combined onto the same Ethernet port, with bandwidth allocated to each application, creating virtual ports, which can be adjusted by customers using a Web interface. Customers can designate how much bandwidth is allocated for each application.

“We continue to drive the value of metro Ethernet and improve the quality of service toward carrier grade,” said Nimesh Shah, senior director, data product management- Business Markets, BellSouth. “Ethernet has always been a best effort services but as we mature the product, we began with allowing customers to do true Class of Service on Layer 2, and now this refinement allows customers the added flexibility of doing CoS in a virtual port environment.”

By allowing customers to assign virtual service classes over a single Ethernet and allow bandwidth among classes of service as they chose, BellSouth will provide “a more efficient, more cost effective, and more reliable service from an applications standpoint,” Shah said. “They can now guarantee the service will support a specific application.”

Interactive and real-time classes of service are designed for voice and video, which are latency sensitive, while the business critical class is set up for data services that require priority above and beyond best-effort IP service.

More customers are looking to converge their services onto an Metro Ethernet backbone, he added.

The Virtual BellSouth Metro Ethernet Service is support by committed information rates, which can vary from 2 Megabits per second up to 900 Mb/s, as well as service level agreements, backed up by a customer network management Web portal which provides visibility into network performance.

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