Frontier launches regional E-NNI service for wholesale Ethernet customers

Frontier has introduced its E-PATH service, giving its wholesale Ethernet customers a new regional external network-to-network interconnection (E-NNI) option to connect their off-net business customer locations.

Although Frontier's carrier division has supported a local IntraLATA (local access transport area) 1 Gbps NNI with its Metro Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) offering, E-PATH provides customers a 10 Gbps interface and the option to move outside a LATA restriction.

Mike Daniel, senior vice president of Carrier Service for Frontier, said in a release that a carrier customer that needs access to a certain market via Frontier for a business customer no longer has to establish an Ethernet interface within each LATA of a state or market where Frontier operates.

E-PATH may be new, but it includes all of the common features and elements of Frontier's current EVPL offering such as MEF 2.0 certification, three classes of service, SLAs and access to a near real-time SLA portal.

Frontier's E-PATH service is currently available 11 markets including Idaho, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wisconsin. It plans to offer the service in Northern California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington in the first quarter of 2015 with additional rollout phases to follow throughout the rest of next year.

The debut of the E-PATH service follows its wholesale Ethernet Internet Access (EIA) service.

Lisa Partridge, senior manager of data market management for Frontier, told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that besides working with Tier 1 providers like AT&T (NYSE: T), Frontier has been keen to develop wholesale services that can appeal to Tier 3 and 4 providers.

For more:
- see the release

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