Like very other major data service provider, AT&T is developing a portfolio of Ethernet services. But the company faces a different type of service evolution than most, however, because it has been offering Ethernet as a service for a longer period of time and has two separate portfolios of products to reconcile.

The former SBC launched Ethernet in the mid-90s and the GigaMAN and DecaMAN brands of Ethernet service – offered at 1 Gigabit per second and 10 Gbps, respectively – are established brands within its 13-state local franchise territory. It also offers switched Ethernet service at 10/100 Mbps and 1 Gbps in key cities within that territory.

Since its early beginnings, AT&T has evolved Ethernet along customer demands, said Bob Walters, executive director of metropolitan data for AT&T.

“We’ve had switched Ethernet in the portfolio since the early ‘90s,” Walters said. “We had GigaMan, which was widely available and broadly adopted and became an increasing part of our offers. That really kick-started the evolution from TDM to Ethernet. As we have seen growing interest in those services, we have Ethernet-enabled our other technologies like SONET, and we now offer it on top of DWDM [dense wave division multiplexing] technologies. We have it highly resilient and protected. With Opt-E-Man, which is switched Ethernet, the customer can interconnect using Ethernet – the service has a lower cost, a little less reliability but a lot more bang for the buck.”

Today, customers can get Ethernet for as low as $5 a month per megabit, Walters said, compared to traditional SONET costs of $25 to $30 for that bandwidth. The full AT&T product line includes Access services, point-to-point offerings such as GigaMan, DecaMan, Metro E-line and Inter-City E-line, Ethernet over Metro SONET Rings and Metro DWDM Rings, and multipoint offerings such as Metro E-LAN and Metro RPR (resilient packet ring) services.

Cost is not the only appeal of Ethernet, Walters adds, pointing to scalability, flexibility, a reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), the familiarity with Ethernet, and its ease of administration.

What AT&T doesn’t yet offer, said David Hold, analyst with Current Analysis, is a national inter-city switched Ethernet service that would enable multipoint connections. Competitive carriers such as Time Warner Telecom, Yipes and Masergy do offer national VPLS or switched Ethernet services.

“That’s one real weakness for AT&T and Verizon both,” Hold said.

As the services have evolved, AT&T has layered in more reliability and resiliency, Walters said.

“As we’ve deployed it we’ve made sure to have as many carrier class attributes as we can bring to the market cost effectively,” he said. “GigaMan went from Ethernet over fiber to Ethernet over wavelength, then we protected it with diverse routes, diverse devices. All that wasn’t available in the early part of 2000, when we launched the service, but they are here today.”

The Opt-E-Man service today offers service level agreements that Walters said are aggressive for the industry.

“We’ve make a big effort to deploy with SLAs that are punitive so that cash goes back,” he said. “It does vary with different services -- good, better, best with the offering. As customers gain more experience, they see that it does meet their needs There is that rap on Ethernet that it’s best –effort. We go to a lot of trouble to make sure it’s not.”

One next step in AT&T’s Ethernet evolution is to explore other means of access, said Rich Klapman, product director, Ethernet Access Services. At their hub sites, many customers are already pushed toward Ethernet as their capacity exceeded DS-3 or 45 Mb/s service and they were looking for more cost-effective high-speed access, he said.

“At the hub sites, we are seeing migration very quickly to DecaMan,” he said. “The remote sites that are at T-1 speed, there are a lot of different options there and these might stay on T-1 for a long time. But we are also working on other possibilities such as Ethernet over copper, and Ethernet over WiMax. We want to figure out what is the evolution for that segment of the network.”