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Broadband Access
Future-Net 2008: NewEdge closes the T1 gap
Debuts MPLS class of service for DSL
by Sean Buckley
If you’re a small-to-midsize business (SMB) with a growing set of
employees and applications, your options to migrate from a low-speed
connection are pretty much limited to making the quantum leap to a T1
line. Yet with the cost of a single T1 being around US$500, such a
prospect is not only expensive, it’s overkill.
Instead, NewEdge Networks believes SMBs should be able to get
guaranteed bandwidth for any service—an aspect traditionally found on
standard T1 circuits—over broadband DSL.
NewEdge formally announced the Classes of Service for DSL at this
week’s Future-Net Conference in Boston, Mass.
In areas where DSL is available, NewEdge will sell the service directly
and through partners for US$240 a month. Bandwidth optimization with
five classes of service, SLAs and a Cisco router upgrade are included in
the service.
Brian Washburn, principal analyst for business network services at
Current Analysis, believes the service signifies a new way to look at
business-class DSL.
“I think this is [a] big innovation in the industry,” he says. “What you
have now is a bunch of broadband players that handle QoS providing
services like voice over IP. Companies have been out there offering MPLS
tunneled across ADSL, but they have not been able to do the class of
service part of it because they can’t get close enough to the access
point to [guarantee] CoS.”
Commissioning a traffic cop
While providing CoS over traditional T1 circuits is a well-established
business, the notion has been pretty much non-existent in the
broadband arena.
The idea is not completely new, however, as a number of other providers
have made attempts to supply some type of QoS level for broadband
access.
Incumbent operators such as Qwest and the former BellSouth offered
MPLS-based DSL services with no specific guarantees on performance,
while competitive operators Covad and MegaPath offered QoS VoIP over
broadband.
What’s more, cable operators have continued to make inroads in the SMB
market providing CoS for voice and data with DOCSIS and its built-in
QoS controls. (See:
MegaPath pumps up the business volume)
Even though these are promising steps, Washburn points out that many
of these solutions fell short of offering true Class of Service.
“Nobody had the MPLS class of service support over broadband,” he
says. “Noone could do end-to-end [CoS] regardless of whether you use
T1, Ethernet, higher speed leased lines, or whatever the underlying
transport mechanism was to extend MPLS and the host of benefits
including CoS both to all that and to broadband. In that respect that’s
where NewEdge has done something that nobody’s done before.”
Up till now, what’s prevented service providers from offering CoS for DSL
is their ability to get close enough to the customer endpoints located
near the operator’s point of presence.
To ensure the security and bandwidth of each of its DSL lines, which are
partitioned off from the public Internet, NewEdge Networks bought Layer-
2 interconnections with its carrier partners (see Figure 1). NewEdge combined these connections with Redback SmartEdge 800 gateway switches to act as traffic cops on the network.
“They took some Redback gear that ensures higher priority traffic gets
priority over lower priority traffic,” Washburn says. “They can get them
close enough in the network so they could supply class of service
support.”
Hitting the sweet spot
NewEdge’s focus on the SMB has been a market segment incumbent
operators traditionally have ignored. In addition, outside of standard
best-effort ADSL service, the traditional T1 level of service with its
US$500 cost is often unnecessary for an SMB.
A NewEdge representative said an unnamed end customer with multiple
sites was able to migrate from costly T1s at several sites to the ADSL
with CoS service.
The customer had deployed T1s because it feared the DSL line would not
have the right QoS to ensure that bandwidth for its critical applications
would be distributed at each site.
Not only is the NewEdge DSL product a more economical solution, it can
now go toe to toe with integrated voice/data cable broadband offerings.
Slowly breaking out of their video-centric shell, cable MSOs along with
competitive carriers (e.g., Covad, MegaPath and NewEdge) continue to
make inroads into the SMB market with a host of integrated voice/data
offerings with some form of CoS over broadband DOCSIS. (See:
Metro Ethernet opening enterprise doors for cable operators and
Thinking Small, May 2004 issue of Telecommunications Americas)
“We have been watching the cable companies that have been coming up
with their DOCSIS 3.0-powered and multi-line business voice services,
and when those guys roll out their integrated voice and data they are
doing it on broadband,” Washburn says.
Wholesale potential
Given the diversity of the market segment, large carriers typically have
not proactively served the SMB market, leaving it wide open for cable
operators and competitive carriers.
Their lack of focus on the SMB market comes down to a couple of
fundamental factors.
For one, large incumbents are more likely to get more revenue from a
large enterprise customer. Secondly, T1 circuits, while optimal for
businesses with multiple lines, are limited in their ability to scale
downward.
“If someone like a telco is trying to compete with an integrated T1
service, and the company needs only four lines, the T1 has a sunk cost
of US$400” Washburn says. “Right there, you’re going to be in the hole
competing against the cable companies.”
The NewEdge solution could be a wholesale opportunity that helps an
incumbent launch its own ADSL with CoS service and combat the cable
and CLEC attack on SMBs.
While nothing has been confirmed, large service providers whose lunch
continues to get eaten by competitive carriers possibly could use
wholesale service as a value add to their own customer bases.
“With this solution, a carrier could wholesale from NewEdge networks and
launch an MPLS-based VoIP and differentiated data traffic service at
price points more competitive against the cable companies,” Washburn
says.
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