Broadwing and Hutchison Global Communications today announced what they claim to be the industry’s first trans-Pacific inter-carrier Ethernet network over virtual private LAN services (VPLS).

The interconnection will enable multinational companies to link Ethernet VPNs, operating at Layer 2 of the network, in North America and Asia. HGC already operates a pan-Asian VPLS network in conjunction with partners in South Korea and Taiwan. Ethernet is the prevalent network service in Asia and Europe and is rapidly gaining steam in North America.

Because standards for interconnection aren’t complete, an inter-carrier network poses a greater challenge, said Jamey Heinze, senior director of product management for Broadwing.

“The standards are not clear--straight up that is part of the issue why this hasn’t been done before,” he said. “The other issue is that there are not a lot of domestic U.S. carriers who have nationwide fully baked Ethernet networks.”

Standards do exist for IP VPNs at Layer 3, but even those standards--the RFC 2547 IP VPN--haven’t been extensively implemented on an intercarrier basis, Heinze said. “Taking it down to Layer 2 is still really cutting edge,” he commented.

Hutchison and Broadwing have turned up the first customer--an HGC customer that is not being identified. The company needed to turn up a leg of a pan-Pacific network in Los Angeles, connecting to a DS-3 over which it will run a 10 Megabit per second Ethernet VLAN. With this announcement, Broadwing has already begun hearing from some of its customers who are interested in connecting with Asian operations.

For the initial deployment, the two companies are using a simple, more manual interface to set VLAN tags for specific customers to put their traffic in the correct network segment, Heinze said, but that will change as the service scales and the companies either use wrappers or pseudo-wire assignment.

The next frontier is Europe, said Gina Nomellini, director of international service for Broadwing.

“In Europe, they got heavily on the Layer 3 VPN bandwagon, so it’s a bit of a switch to move to VPLS as Layer 2, but we are talking with a potential partner there as well,” she said.