JANUARY 3, 2008 -- Verizon Business (search for Verizon Business) yesterday recapped its 2007 progress, which it says included bolstering the capacity, speed, resiliency, and efficiency of its worldwide network. According to the carrier, its global IP network now consists of 485,000 route miles and serves more than 2,700 cities in 150 countries.
Globalization continued to drive customer demand for IP, Ethernet, and managed services for Verizon Business, say company representatives. Through the third quarter, customer sales from these strategic services grew at more than 28% year over year. Â Â Â Â Â Â
"Our world-class network is the foundation for offering secure communications and IT solutions to our customers," contends Fred Briggs, Verizon Business executive vice president of network and technology. "The Verizon Business network is backed by stringent service level agreements, and we continue to invest and transform our global IP network to meet the evolving needs of our business and government customers worldwide."Â Â
"We're growing network capacity while streamlining network elements to enhance performance," he adds, "and we're improving on our already exceptional network reliability while reducing network latency."
In response to growing bandwidth demand from customers, Verizon Business says it successfully planned and completed the industry's first field trial of 100-Gbit/sec optical transmission in November (See "Verizon completes 100-Gbit/sec field trial.") The test was conducted on a section of Verizon Business' ultra long haul system between Tampa, FL, and Miami and carried a live video feed on one 100-Gbit/sec wavelength for the full 312-mile distance. Government and enterprise customers, such as financial and medical institutions, will benefit from the higher speeds and greater network efficiencies that 100 Gbits/sec provide, says the carrier.Â
Looking toward higher circuit speeds demanded by customers in 2007, the company also quadrupled speeds from 10 Gbits/sec to 40 Gbits/sec on selected routes of its U.S. IP and MPLS backbones, using Alcatel-Lucent's 1625 LambdaXtreme Transport. Deploying 40- Gbit/sec technology benefits Verizon Business customers by increasing not only the capacity but also the performance of the network, in particular lower latency and reduced jitter, claims the company. Driven by bandwidth-hungry customer applications such as video, Gigabit Ethernet, and Internet traffic worldwide, Verizon Business says it will continue to deploy 40 Gbits/sec on key routes.
Last year, Verizon Business also marked the halfway point in its deployment of the 50,000-mile, all-optical ultra long haul (ULH) U.S. network (See "Verizon Business optical network reaches halfway point.") By adding 6,000 miles and covering 15 more routes, the company says it is delivering on its plan to leverage the benefits of ULH, which allows customers to seamlessly adopt bandwidth-intensive business applications like Web services, multimedia content distribution, grid computing, real-time imaging, and storage networking. ULH also allows Verizon Business to extend the signal reach beyond 1,200 miles without regenerating the signal.
The company also deployed ULH equipment in 2007 on the core backbone network routes between Verizon Business' main European network hubs in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, and Brussels, offering the first 2,000 miles of ULH transport in the Verizon Business European network (See "Verizon Business to build ULH network in Europe, selects Nortel optical equipment.")
Through 2007, the company continued to prepare for the launch of the 11,185-mile-long Trans-Pacific Express (TPE), a new undersea cable that will provide direct high-speed Internet routes between the United States and China. Customers will be able to access the cable system at wavelengths of up to 10 Gbits/sec, not available with current undersea cable systems, say company representatives. Verizon Business is the only U.S.-based carrier involved in the TPE's initial consortium, which includes carriers from China, Taiwan and Korea. Completion is scheduled for the third quarter of 2008.
Verizon Business also began implementing mesh architecture on its major undersea cable network that crosses the Pacific Ocean. The carrier says a mesh architecture is superior to the previously designed ring architecture because customer traffic in a mesh design can be programmed to take the shortest route between two points rather than traveling in a ring configuration. Network traffic can be quickly and easily diverted around sections of the network that might be damaged or experiencing traffic congestion, allowing customer traffic to quickly reach its destination without interruption.
Verizon Business also says it continued it aggressive deployment of converged packet architecture (CPA) in 2007 with 17 cities added in the U.S., bringing the total to 46 cities. Nineteen cities were added in Europe and five cities in the Asia-Pacific region. CPA allows customers to move seamlessly from the older TDM hierarchy to a packet-based technology, explains the carrier. CPA also uses virtual connections, which means a single connection replaces multiple connections, resulting in improved efficiency for customers.
In 2007, Verizon Business expanded the global availability of its Ethernet capabilities, enabling even more enterprise customers to benefit from high-speed, secure, and easily scalable connectivity, say carrier representatives. Verizon Business' Ethernet access to IP services is now available in almost 40 countries worldwide--nearly double the availability since the start of the year.
Ethernet access to Verizon Private IP has been extended to customers in Canada and Latin America and into China and India, and European availability has been enhanced. In Latin America, access is now available to Verizon Business customers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Columbia, and in Europe, to customers in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and Slovakia.
Finally, Verizon Business says it is aggressively moving to the next-generation Internet protocol with plans to globally deploy IPv6 on its public IP network. IPv6 offers more Internet addresses than the current IPv4 standard. This upgrade is in response to the growing need from Verizon Business customers for more IP addresses to accommodate additional mobile devices as well as "smart" appliances that have the capability to receive remote communications. In addition, the federal government has ordered its agencies to become IPv6-capable by June 2008; Verizon Business provides voice, data, wireless, security, and Internet services to more than 135 U.S. government agencies around the world.
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