In the face of increasing demand for IP and Ethernet services from wireline and wireless service providers, BellSouth Interconnection Services this week unveiled new wavelength service options, in the form of channel and dedicated ring services.

BellSouth Interconnection has offered wavelength services on a wholesale basis for three years now but the new offerings promise the service assurance associated with Sonet as well as greater deployment flexibility.

The services are part of BellSouth’s transition from providing wholesale services on a LATA by LATA basis to becoming a regionally based IP service provider, said Robert Bickerstaff, vice president of interconnection marketing for BellSouth. The LATA restrictions expire at the end of 2005 and the company begins the transition to regional offerings, he said.

“We are seeing packet demand increase exponentially, not just from the Internet but also from wireless 3G services,” he said, citing projections of 25 million wireless 3G users by the end of 2008. “There is tremendous IP demand at the edge, and there has to be a way of cost-effectively backhauling that traffic. Also, all of our major carriers have asked us for IP and Ethernet connectivity at Layer 2 and even Layer 3. We need to address that with a protocol independent, bit-rate independent service, so we can avoid building two to three overlay networks.”

The optical services achieve that protocol independence, enabling customers to direct put whatever traffic they have, whether legacy or IP, directly onto the network, said Nancy Starcher, director of product marketing for access transport for BellSouth Interconnection Services.

Customers can buy individual wavelengths or multiple wavelengths on a point-to-point basis through the Wavelength Channel Service or support multi-node networks on the Wavelength Dedicated Ring Service, she said.

“This provides a technology bridge” by supporting any type of traffic including new wireless offerings, storage area networks and any type of data, Starcher said. “The value is around efficiency, interoperability and flexibility. The savings is 25% in cost per bit over TDM and multiple networks.”

Customers also achieve significant scalability, said Terry Green, technical specialist. As customer demand increases, rather than deploy OC-768 systems, BellSouth is moving to optical connections at one gigabit per second to 10 gigabits per second.