Global Crossing announced it has added the Global Crossing EtherSphere™ family of services to the company's Ethernet WAN transport offers. The new globally available services are EtherSphere Multipoint-to-Multipoint, EtherSphere Point-to-Multipoint and EtherSphere Point-to-Point solutions. They are available today as enterprise and wholesale offers in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom (UK), Asia, and Latin America.
Previously available in the UK as a metropolitan Ethernet offer, the
expanded EtherSphere Ethernet WAN transport family now offers customers
ubiquitous, global Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS). EtherSphere
solutions use mature, familiar Ethernet technology for wide area
transport of enterprise services, such as file sharing, email, document
management, enterprise resource planning, and real-time collaboration.
The technology is reliable, can easily accommodate additional bandwidth
in small increments, offers cost efficiencies traditionally associated
with Ethernet, and interworks with other Global Crossing WAN solutions,
such as Global Crossing IP Virtual Private Networks. The service is
provided over Global Crossing's dedicated Multi Protocol Label
Switching backbone network to ensure high-speed, reliable,
region-to-region connectivity and access to the Internet.
Detailed information is available from Global Crossing.
Detailed information is available from Global Crossing.
The rise of WAN Ethernet services is a fascinating and exciting phenomenon for those of us who have watched the telecommunications industry develop over the past 25 to 30 years.
I see two particularly salient points in this move.
First, this greatly simplifies connectivity from the user/customer perspective. Rather than having to learn about and possibly implement a new protocol every three to five years (e.g. from dedicated circuits to frame relay to ATM to MPLS), the user is able to stay with one VERY familiar protocol that they already know.
This move toward a managed service leaves all of the details of WAN service transport to the provider.
Secondly, the user is removed from caring about the efficiency of the transport protocol as high bandwidth has become more or less a commodity. This is a result of the steadily decreasing price per bit-per-second. (But I do have a question about the pricing in a related post.)
The bottom line is that in order to survive in the current and coming economic conditions, users will have to continue to evolve from the old BYOB (Be Your Own Bell) model to a more service-based approach.
Looking forward to your comments on this.