Time Warner Telecom announced on Friday that it is now offering cross-country metro Ethernet service in all of its 44 U.S. markets.

The new offering, branded Extended Native LAN, adds to the local offerings of various types (point-to-point, point-to-multipoint connections, managed-switch frame-relay replacement service and local premium Sonet service) that TWT has offered since it entered the metro Ethernet market in March 2003. The company now has more than 680 customers for the portfolio, said TWT senior vice president Michael Rouleau. Speeds for the new service range from 2 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s, in larger increments for higher speeds. The price will vary according to the distance of customers’ links and the amount of bandwidth they consume.

"Most [customers] are limited with frame-relay infrastructure, and many haven’t made the leap to ATM in the wide area, so this gives them an easy way to upgrade their bandwidth and have a seamless network from market to market," Rouleau said.

The company actually launched the service in December and has "a handful" of customers so far, said TWT senior vice president Mike Rouleau, including First Magnus Financial, a mortgage banking firm whose data centers in Honolulu, Hawaii and Ontario, Calif., are now linked to its headquarters in Tucson, Ariz., thanks to TWT.

Both AT&T and Verizon Communications plan to introduce inter-city Ethernet this quarter. AT&T will offer the service on private lines, while Verizon will use Martini tunneling and Layer 3 switching to deliver the service over an IP backbone. Time Warner Telecom is also using an IP backbone for its service, but unlike AT&T, TWT will use Kompella tunneling, with the help of equipment from Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.

Separately, TWT today reported a $21.3 million (or $0.19 a share) loss for the fourth quarter of 2003 on $169 million in revenue, a 3% drop from 2002’s fourth-quarter revenue.