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QUALITY OF SERVICE MOVES DOWN MARKET

September 24, 2006
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(Telephony Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Call it the fallout from MPLS deployment. Service providers deployed multi-protocol label switching to provide classes of service (COS) that protect and prioritize their business customers' voice, video and mission-critical data applications.



Now, according to some within the industry, businesses are asking for DSL services that offer the same thing to their remote locations that an MPLS service brings to the headquarters.

In a world where MPLS has become a wide new area of technology, DSL with MPLS isn't there yet, said Drew Lydecker, a voice and data specialist with CDW, who serves as an agent for 24 major service providers to a range of business customers. Our customers want to be able to use DSL as access for the MPLS backbone, so they can get class of service type technologies.

For many, the options are to use a more expensive dedicated circuit to remote locations or a PC-based virtual private network (VPN) tunnel into the MPLS cloud, he said.

Some service providers, such as managed service provider Virtela and national data CLEC New Edge Networks now part of EarthLink and Sprint Business, have added COS capabilities to their offerings, to address the need for consistent service quality over DSL.

New Edge Networks announced its end-to-end COS on MPLS-based VPNs in August, promising to have five classes of service available across its network, including the access portion, whether it is DSL, T-1 or frame relay (see chart on page 27). The company was responding to customer demand for end-to-end COS to support a burgeoning number of critical data network applications, including voice over IP (VoIP), said Greg Griffiths, vice president of marketing.

What we are seeing in the marketplace, and we continue to see over the last several years, is new applications and a very dynamic IT environment, he said. In addition to VoIP and applications tied to VoIP, service-oriented architecture as a philosophy is coming out. Network managers are trying to do a lot more and be more productive with less on the resource side.

By adding COS, New Edge is able to move up market, courting larger companies with remote locations to its Big Foot network.

As a result, he said, they are looking to use single facilities to the greatest extent possible, which often means having one circuit to the outside world and all the applications running on top. That leads to the need for prioritized bandwidth.

Virtela, which launched its DSL with COS within the last year, saw demand from its multinational customers to be able to guarantee critical applications at even its most remote sites and not just the headquarters location.

They may have a handful of people at those remote sites, but they had critical apps running there, said Gunnar Peters, senior product manager for enterprise VPN and MPLS services for Virtela.

In many cases, it isn't VoIP or other delay-sensitive services that is driving the need for COS-based DSL, Peters added.

What our customers are telling us is that there are specific applications and that it is key to make sure they are working, he said. It may be e-mail or Internet access or something else.

As a global managed service provider, Virtela has multinational clients that expect guaranteed service levels wherever they have remote offices, making DSL the likely access method. Virtela's approach is to use DiffServ as a feature on top of DSL to guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth to a specific application. The company is able to remotely program the customer's router, as well as modify its own network, to handle COS.

BellSouth is in the process of upgrading its DSLAMs from ATM to Gigabit Ethernet, and once that process is completed, it will be able to offer COS features over DSL, said Nimesh Shah, senior director of data product management of business markets for BellSouth.

One of the things we are seeing as customers look to create consistently ubiquitous networks with consistently available bandwidth is the need to have COS, he said. We are in the midst of creating capabilities that would support those kinds of services.

Today, the company offers a mid-band Ethernet product over copper lines that includes that function, albeit at a higher price than DSL, and it offers a private DSL service that doesn't touch the Internet but is still best effort, Shah said.

The challenge to deploying COS-based DSL is getting the requirements right and getting the technology deployed on a ubiquitous basis, he added.

We can see that demand is growing we need to qualify that and make sure this is what customers are asking us to go do, Shah said. And we need to get the requirements together that will enable us to integrate with the network.

The upgrade to Gig-E involves both BellSouth's DSLAMs and the aggregation points that sit upstream from the DSLAMs, said Glenn Couper, senior director in BellSouth's DSL product planning and development department. One of the next steps, both men agreed, is for the product team to develop requirements for the network team.

We need to give Glenn the necessary requirements so when the DSL traffic hits the aggregation point, we pull the private traffic onto our private MPLS net as opposed to sending that out onto the Internet, Shah said.

From the network perspective, we have to look across both the network and the [customer premises equipment], Couper said. Our network can deliver those capabilities now; it's not ubiquitous because that is part of the upgrade going on now. But we also have to make sure the CPE we offer can support it as well, and we haven't done that study yet.

Verizon also has looked at offering COS for DSL, according to a spokesman, in order to provide guaranteed bandwidth for VoIP for small businesses.

We are aware that this is going to be an emerging need, but at the moment, there is not enough demand to justify the investment in the QOS/SLA kind of thing, he said. Demand for VoIP over DSL is still miniscule. It's on the radar, and we will keep monitoring that.

Demand from larger businesses for this kind of service is likely to grow as they enable teleworkers and implement disaster recovery plans, said Lawrence Byrd, director of IP telephony and mobility for Avaya, which makes IP PBXs and other telecom gear.

Businesses creating disaster recovery and business continuity services are looking at the ability to rapidly turn up a teleworker network in the event of a weather disaster, terrorist event or Avian flu outbreak. VoIP phones, particularly soft-phones that run off a laptop and package all the office voice features, would make such an effort possible, but the underlying network would need to support that.

A lot of consumer issues are about how fast the [broadband] network is, but the business issue is not how fast but is it consistent, can I get QOS? Byrd said. I may get a very fast download but with a lot of delay and jitter. The ability to do this kind of VoIP network relies on consistency and QOS.

Copyright 2006 by Prism Business Information. All rights reserved.www.prismb2b.com


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