Orange Business Services continues to dominate MNC Ethernet service market

Orange Business Services' Ethernet service suite continues to resonate with multinational corporations (MNC) that are increasingly requiring higher speed Ethernet for their applications.

Once again, the service provider's Ethernet services for MNCs topped Vertical Systems Group's 2010 Global Provider Leaderboard in terms of retail Ethernet ports.

Ethernet is one of the broadband service elements of France Telecom Orange Group's corporate project, Conquests 2015.

For Orange Business Services, the dominant factors of adoption continue to be speed and geographic reach. In 2011 alone, Orange Business Services said that over one-third of the RFQ (request for quotes) it received from MNCs were for 100 Mbps and above. One of its speed goals for 2011 is to provide 100 Mbps-10 Gbps Ethernet access to strategic customer sites.

From a geographic reach perspective, Orange Business Services' Ethernet service reach is quite vast, reaching over 3,000 cities in France with its International Ethernet Link service. Outside of France, Orange's Ethernet access for IP VPN extends into 52 countries with plans to extend into 62 in the first half of this year.  

Rosemary Cochran, principal and co-founder of Vertical Systems Group said Orange is aggressively building out to build out its Ethernet network to address "a multinational corporation's global network needs with these hybrid Ethernet VPN combinations, and more specifically native Ethernet access to VPNs," she said, adding that this "is a long haul mesh opportunity, which ultimately may be VPLS, but when you look at the access pipes you have got a lot of T1/E1 connections and the bandwidth is a consideration when you want to go up and speed you get a lot more flexibility if you use Ethernet."

Dennis Kruse, Vice President of Network Solutions at Orange Business, said he's seeing more MNCs use Ethernet to connect to managed IP network services.

"What I think is really interesting is how much Ethernet services are available as an access technology to get from the customer premises to our service provider networks," he said in a previous interview with FierceTelecom. "There's a significant volume of growth in Ethernet access to MPLS services and Internet access."

Kruse added that because Orange "elected to position Ethernet not as a replacement or a substitute for managed IP/MPLS networks, but really as a complement, and that complement is how we can connect to data centers, adding that "there's this whole market of interconnecting data centers with high speed Ethernet connections."

For more:
- see the release

Related articles:
VSG: MNCs increased Ethernet access purchases in 2010
Orange fans out its international Ethernet reach
Dennis Kruse, Orange Business Services, on cloud services and Ethernet exchanges
Vertical: Global Ethernet interconnect market rises up

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