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Carrier Services
Tiscali International Network takes carrier Ethernet global
Ethernet extension supports any-to-any connectivity to more world markets
by Doug Allen
AT&T is rolling out its own Ethernet VPLS to more international sites, but it appears that IP MPLS capacity wholesaler Tiscali International Network will take the prize in terms of number of major markets worldwide online for its Ethernet portfolio. Its latest addition is Ethernet Extension, an international transport service for regional providers, VARS and system integrators targeting the enterprise. These players can leverage Tiscali’s last mile Ethernet runs into “all” major international markets so smaller providers can greatly extend their footprint.
Though Tiscali’s global IP MPLS backbone is made up of peering agreements with national access providers and regional carriers, as well as partners who supply local Ethernet tails in Europe, the U.S. and Asia-Pac, customers still benefit from dealing with a single wholesale network provider who can guarantee performance across each sub-network. Tiscali’s emphasis on full-featured E-NNI compliance is clearly a major enabler for its worldwide reach, and one most carriers will have difficulty matching until suitable standards emerge.
The service runs directly to the corporate customer site, providing point-to-point or any-to-any connectivity for VPNs or VPLS respectively. As one of the few European providers to offer VPLS, Tiscali could emerge as a market leader for customers seeking flexible, multi-protocol traffic support. Currently, most international providers offer only E-Line (point-to-point) services, with just a very few such as KPN International and AT&T able to provision Ethernet VPLS in a cross-border mesh.
That leaves COLT, Interoute, Verizon Business, BT and France Telecom all trailing behind (though they can create any-to-any Ethernet VPNs by running Ethernet over SDH), and gives Tiscali some valuable competitive differentiation when factoring in its global reach. (Tiscali has not released a full list of its network coverage, saying only that it reaches “all” major international destinations. By way of comparison, KPN offers VPLS services in 22 European countries, AT&T’s OPT-E-WN has just been made available across 14 countries in Europe and Asia-Pac, while Reliance Globalcom markets VPLS in 37 countries globally.)
In addition, QoS traffic prioritization mechanisms function in an overlay to the network. MPLS traffic engineering prevents accidental oversubscription and guarantees bandwidth. Class of Service parameters can be set at Layer 3 (through protocols such as IP addressing, I-BTP, BGP and DNS) as well as Layer 2. DDoS is used to support all streams, both unicast and multicast. Transport is based on the pseudowire encapsulation (PWE) standard (Martini-flavor) for Layer 2 switching over MPLS, while also supporting VPLS transport by using MPLS for LAN extension across the WAN with a full mesh of transport tunnels between provider edge routers.
SLAs for the service cover end-to-end transport, but as Joel Stradling, senior analyst at Current Analysis points out in a recent intelligence report, “TINet’s partners around the world result in considerable off-net deployments for geographically comprehensive Layer 2 end-to-end Ethernet implementations [but] relying on such partners reduces the level of control and eats into margins. Depending on the country, it could be difficult or downright impossible to support fully transparent Ethernet access with VPLS support, monitoring of the off-net tails and consistent SLAs.”
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