Verizon Partner Solutions (VPS), the Bell company¡¯s wholesale arm, announced today the launch of its bandwidth-on-demand service in New York City. VPS plans to expand the availability to Washington D.C. by the middle of next year and other major metros on the East Coast by the beginning of 2009.
¡°Bandwidth-on-demand...provides the ability for customers to actually turn up circuits on an optical network literally within minutes in many cases,¡± says Quintin Lew, vice president at VPS, noting provisioning SONET and Ethernet services normally takes 30 to 90 days.
Offered under regulatory for bearance granted the carrier last year, the bandwidth-on-demand service includes two components ¨C a fixed facility from a location to Verizon¡¯s intelligent core and the on-demand private line circuits. Carriers can purchase fixed facilities (OC12, OC48 and OC192) for two-year terms. The on-demand circuits are available in the following speeds: DS3, OC3 (channelized and concatenated), OC12, OC48 and gigabit Ethernet. Ethernet services are offered in a variety of throughputs ¨C 50mbps, 150mbps, 300mbps, 450mbps, 600mbps and full rate ¨C on a gigE interface.
Lew says the rate structure for the product has been simplified. Wholesale customers pay a fixed fee for the facility plus usage for the circuit in increments as low as 24 hours. In addition, mileage charges have been eliminated.
The launch in New York City today follows a trial with an unnamed carrier customer. The trial was initiated last year, and concluded recently with four-weeks of testing. ¡°We have been working through several different test scenarios all to the goal of establishing a full end-to-end ¡®touchless¡¯ provision. I think that makes us pretty unique in the industry for services of DS3 and above,¡± says Larry O¡¯Neill, a VPS product manager who has been working on the bandwidth-on-demand project since its inception. Touchless provisioning, he says, means VPS accepts the access service requests (ASRs) from the wholesale customer and no human intervention is required to provision the circuit, update the inventory, create the maintenance and inventory records, and complete the circuit and submit it to billing.