Verizon's wholesale organization today said it will trial what is believed to be the industry's first bandwidth-on-demand solution for carrier customers next week in New York City. The trial will use a process known as control-plane technology--similar to SS7 signaling--to allow electronic devices within the optical networks to easily communicate with each other.  

Verizon Partner Solutions has been working with its vendors, Telcordia and Lucent Technologies, to develop the ability to allow its wholesale customers to order high-capacity circuits including DS-3, SONET and Ethernet links, through an automated process that takes minutes, versus the current order entry process that can takes weeks or months, said Quintin Lew, vice president.

"This is something that is unprecedented in the industry," Lew said. "We are going through a trial--testing with a wholesale customer. We have been developing this the last couple of years with key vendors--Telcordia and Lucent have been very much in the forefront, in helping us develop the OSSs and other back-end support systems we need."

If the trial is successful, the service could be commercially available as early as mid-2007, he said.

While Verizon Partner Solutions has worked to automate the ordering process, the bandwidth-on-demand service poses extraordinary new challenges to billing systems and back-office operations, Lew said. Allowing customers to directly set up and take down services for variable periods creates changes that ripple through almost the entire network operation.

"You can obviously understand the challenges in billing," he said. "We typically bill for the month. In this case, you could be billing in increments of a minute or by the bandwidth or both."

One of the things Verizon hopes to learn from the trial is how best to handle the billing, Lew said.

"We will test the technical capability, look at the cost implications to our network as well as the support infrastructure. We will use cost models to develop pricing methodology."

The control-plane functionality will be activated to add a layer of intelligence to next-generation add-drop multiplexers within Verizon's network, which will enable the devices to communicate with other similarly enabled elements much as routers communicate today. A request for a new circuit can then be sent to one enabled network element, instead of having to manually contact each network element involved in circuit setup, which is what is done today. Intermediate network elements can be queried on bandwidth availability as part of the process of setting up a circuit end-to-end. When the path has been determined, cross-connects are established in each network element and equipment options are determined, enabling the service to be set-up in minutes.  

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