AT&T has gone global with its carrier Ethernet offering, adding Germany, the UK, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore and Japan to its service area. Previously, the company had only offered carrier Ethernet in the U.S., but the company is facing competition from KPN and Tiscali in overseas markets.
The OPT-E-WAN offering provides LAN/WAN transport and VPLS service to large enterprises and multinational business customers. KPN has a VPLS offering available in 22 countries around the globe, but BT Global, Orange Business Services and Verizon Business have yet to launch cross-border VPLS service throughout Europe.
Customers get a lot of bells and whistles, including the ability to retain control of IP routing tables and apply bandwidth priorities to separate VLANs. A potential downside is that AT&T reportedly only has one Ethernet- Network to Network Interconnection (E-NNI) transport partner in each country initially. OPT-E-WAN is also not available as a fully managed end-to-end service and is not integrated with AT&T's online monitoring management portal.
For more:
- AT&T's Ethernet footprint goes global. Article.