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Carrier Services
Global Crossing continues to deploy EtherExtend Flex internationally
Stays on pace to bring Ethernet platform to 70 international markets by year-end
by Doug Allen
Global Crossing has announced service availability of its Ethernet access service platform, EtherExtend Flex, in four new markets, from Asia to the U.S. The latest additions to the international carrier’s Ethernet footprint—Singapore, Frankfurt, Houston and Sunnyvale—bring the total number of service-ready markets to 26, including coverage in London, Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Toronto and 18 other U.S. cities. Full deployment to over 70 points of presence, including Latin America, is set for the end of this year.
Global Crossing appears to be moving fairly aggressively on its promise to quickly ramp up service POPs when it first launched the platform back in January with only 15 markets ready to go. Activating another 45 POPs in the next six months remains a challenge, especially as the carrier hopes to deliver Ethernet VPLS service on top of EtherExtend by that point. An expanded timeline—otherwise known as “deadline creep”—could occur, especially in a sluggish telecom economy, although demand for business Ethernet remains strong, particularly where the technology delivers direct and immediate savings.
EtherExtend will not enjoy the widest network footprint either in the U.S., Europe or Asia, but upon completion, the carrier will be able to better compete for the mid-market medium- to- large multi-national corporation that may not be picked up by Tier 1 rivals AT&T and Verizon Business, among others. Competition even in the mid-market is still relatively fierce, so a global network becomes even more essential.
That competition is tough in terms of feature-set and complementary portfolio of services, too (think Verizon Business’s new Dynamic Bandwidth bandwidth-on-demand offering), but EtherExtend stacks up pretty well as a basic network access solution. It comes with a flexible and wide range of bandwidth increments, VLAN-based Ethernet Virtual Circuits for logical separation of traffic and greater security, QoS and SLAs tied to the end-user’s application performance requirements.
In addition, customers can burst above the committed data rate instead of having to configure access at higher rates (and greater cost); a Ethernet network-to-network interface (E-NNI) delivers traffic from the customer premise to the appropriate in-region network partner and then to the nearest Global Crossing PoP, lowering costs and ensuring that end-to-end traffic rides the carrier’s backbone as much as possible. EtherExtend also extends customer access to additional, complementary provider services, such as IP VPN, Dedicated Internet Access and IP Transit, as well as managed service support for related business applications, like VoIP and media conferencing.
Currently, though, the market impact of EtherExtend is fairly low on the Asia Pacific Ethernet services market, since service availability is restricted to Hong Kong and Singapore, a poor showing compared to providers such as AT&T, BT, Orange Business Services and Verizon Business, all of which offer Ethernet access across more in-region countries.
“Global Crossing needs to expand its EtherExtend Flex footprint to include countries such as Australia, China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan to pose a greater threat to competitors in the region as well as to support its international VPLS in the future,” according to a recent intelligence report by Siow Meng Soh and Joel Stradling, senior analysts at Current Analysis.
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