Verizon Business has launched an ambitious plan to change the way it handles customer service, and is exploring other options as well to bring capabilities such as fixed-mobile convergence to its customers as a network service.

The customer service and FMC plans are part of a larger plan that includes both capacity and reach enhancements to the Verizon Business network and a move to more reliable and cost effective optical mesh technology, according to Fred Briggs, executive vice president of network operations.

While much of FMC has been focused on dual-mode handsets and getting IP Multimedia Subsystem technology up and running, Verizon Business plans to offer its corporate customers a much easier path to convergence as early as this October.

“We are going to deploy a box in conjunction with the PBX where your cellphone becomes an extension of your PBX, with a common number and common voice mail,” Briggs said. “We already have a remote access manager for the mobile worker which lets them manage wireless access – EVDO, WiFi, Ethernet dial-up –via an IP-VPN [virtual private network] in order to access the corporate networks. We are also going to take that capability and do direct access to MPLS network.”

The major customer service initiative is intended to be a differentiator for Verizon Business in a highly competitive global market.

“What we do today in terms of customer service is good, and I’m very proud of that, but we want to step it up to a whole new level to where we are head and shoulders above the rest of the industry,” Briggs said in an interview.

That includes changing the way Verizon measures its on-time delivery of service, he added.

“Today, we take an order and give the customer a date and measure ourselves against that date, whether or not it was the date the customer wanted,” Briggs said. “We are putting a significant amount of investment into how we do order entry, how we provision any service for our customers. The whole idea is to get to real-time provisioning. We will now only measure ourselves against the date the customer wants. If that’s tomorrow, we’ll do our darndest to get it there tomorrow.”

Verizon’s goal is to meet the customer-desired delivery date 90% of the time, he said, and in the process “change the way we look at it, to look at the service fulfillment the way the customer looks at it. We will try to meet their demands. Obviously, we won’t do that every time but we can change the mind set of customer service.”

In addition to real-time provisioning, customers are looking for 100% network availability and an accurate bill. By automating the service provisioning process, Verizon Business can not only speed up service delivery but also make sure the billing is more accurate by eliminating human error in the service set-up process, Briggs said.

“We get accurate information from the customers into the billing engine,” he said. “If we don’t let anybody touch it, it improves our accuracy.”

Network availability requires other kinds of investments, including upgrading transport networks with Ultra Long Haul technology, replacing Sonet rings with optical mesh networks and, by year’s end, upgrading core network routers.

“We are 60% done with Ultra Long Haul this year, and we start in Europe this year,” Briggs said. “As you go to new technology, the backbone continues to improve. Today we use Sonet rings, we are going to an optical mesh, which also continues to improve performance, and it improves the predictability of latency which is a huge deal, particularly for financial customers.”

Verizon has completed optical mesh in its Atlantic network, which enabled the company to restore service to Asia-Pacific area this winter after a major outage there.

“We are now starting it in the U.S. and next year will do it in Europe,” Briggs said. “The migration will happen over the next three to four years. And we will do the Trans-Pacific Express with optical mesh.”

Verizon is the lone U.S. carrier on the Trans-Pacific Express undersea optical network linking the U.S. to China, with transit rights to India, Hong Kong, Vietnam and other Asian countries.

Predictable latency on both original and backup routes is increasingly important to customers, such as financial institutions, whose applications become unusable at higher latency, he said. For that reason, Verizon is using a “dual rail” on its Ultra Long Haul network, using twice the number of electronics but keeping the latency the same for both primary and backup routes.

“With electronic trading, the different of a couple of milliseconds is the difference between a successful trade and an unsuccessful trade,” Briggs said.

Another major change will take place in 2008, Briggs said, when Verizon moves to a converged IP core.

“We expect to have a new [router] box we will trial at the end of this year,” he said. “We will be able to build virtual networks on it, virtual private networks and a virtual public IP network, and we will have hitless failover, so we can do software upgrades and hardware upgrades and not have to take the customer down.”

Such gear is not yet available but will be from major vendors including Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks by year’s end for trial deployment in 2008, Briggs expects.

“We will have the capability to converge all the public and private IP,” he said. “But we will keep the private IP network and the public IP network separate, because there are concerns that any time you touch the public Internet, that it compromises security. The key for us will be using one box and getting dramatically improved performance.”

In addition, Verizon has announced plans to deploy 40 Gigabit per second fiber links this year, and 100 Gb/s links by 2010.