Verizon today launched its promised national Ethernet Virtual Private Line Service (E-VPLS), a Layer 2 service that offers enterprises an easier way to link multiple locations with Ethernet without surrendering control of their routing.

The product launch puts Verizon on the E-VPLS map ahead of AT&T, and on par with smaller competitors such as Time Warner Telecom, Yipes!, Masergy and Broadwing. By offering the service with broad national reach, and connections at speeds from 1 Megabit per second to 1 Gigabit per second, Verizon Business believes it is establishing a competitive advantage, said Michael Volgende, director of Ethernet Services.

“This is a major differentiator – there is a huge embedded base of frame and ATM networks that are out there,” he said. “Evolving to Ethernet has already been occurring but predominately in the metro space and for layer 3 services. There is a huge group of customers who have not been able to avail themselves of an Ethernet solution because they want a layer 2 solution, either because they are running applications that are not IP or they want to retain routing control. This services g
ives customers a chance to evolve to a service arrangement on a national basis that greatly improves their speed and performance while at the same time allows them to retain IP routing control and run non-IP applications. It’s a wonderful migration path for customers that allows them to support their applications that they are running and the way they are managing those applications.”

The carrier is deploying its E-VPLS service over its Converged Packet Architecture, rounding out its Carrier Ethernet offerings, said Alla Reznik, group manager of Ethernet product marketing for Verizon Business.

“We haven’t built yet another network to offer this,” she said. “We announced our intention to go forward with CPA in 2005 and we are going ahead with that.
With this announcement we will be using the same architecture to provide E-VPLS. That b
rings the whole suite together and the vision we have put forward in 2005 is now realized.
In terms of product capabilities, we are close to a full suite of services. It’s a powerful offering because you can order one access service and I can deliver multiple things – private IP, E-VPLS – over that one access.”

E-VPLS enables enterprises to combine applications into a single access pipe and use Class of Service capabilities to protect priority and latency-sensitive traffic. It is a protocol independent service that essentially acts as a wide area extension of a Local Area Network, using MAC (Media Access Control) addresses for routing. A MAC address is a unique code assigned to a piece of hardware in a network.

Verizon sees the service as universally popular, and not constrained to certain types of customers, Volgende said. Customers can buy connections as low as 1 Mbps and pay for as little as 64 kilobits per second of premium quality of service, the highest CoS. That granularity of service enables customers to tailor bandwidth purchases, based on the needs of specific locations from a large headquarters office down to a small remote location such as a retail store or insurance agent’s office, Reznik said.

The E-VPLS service is available nationally right now and will be available globally next year, according to Verizon Business.