EarthLink targets social media companies with 500G, Terabit wholesale service

ORLANDO, Fla.--EarthLink is seeing potential to target an emerging set of content company wholesale customers with its managed transport service.

The managed transport service will allow customers to build and manage customer networks in increments of 500 Gbps, with the ability to scale up to multiple Terabits as demand dictates.

A key point of the new service is flexibility in terms of both bandwidth and how it is provisioned.

Service provider customers can get the amount of capacity needed in 500G increments and EarthLink can either provision and manage all sub-rate circuits (100G, 10G, 2.5G, 1G, below 1G) for the customer or design it to be managed by the customer.

What drove EarthLink to introduce this product was a number of new customers, particularly content providers that were requesting dark fiber solutions or an equivalent product.

"We have been talking to our newer accounts out there, and when I talk about newer accounts they're not your standard telecom type account, but rather the content providers," said Lorenzo Leuzzi, VP of carrier and wholesale services, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "Little by little they all did have some pressing needs for dark fiber, which they could not find, so they asked us if there's a type of ownership they could have where it's almost like ownership economics."

While EarthLink will sell some dark fiber where it has available pairs, the managed transport service gives the customer the ability to provision services as if they were purchasing dark fiber. EarthLink can also take on all of the management if the customer does not have the in-house staff to support the service themselves.

"It's flexible in how much management we can do," said Scott Maginn, director of product and business development for EarthLink Carrier. "We can design it in a way where we do all the management, provisioning and maintenance of regeneration sites and colocation huts or design it in such a way if our customers have the infrastructure to support some of that."

Similar to its retail offerings, EarthLink's managed transport service also offers the benefits of flexible pricing structures designed with owner-like economics, and leverages EarthLink's established experience and history building, monitoring and repairing fiber networks, and 24x7 NOC support.

"We came up with this managed transport product, which gives our customers the ability to purchase similar to as if they were buying dark fiber," Leuzzi said. "The real benefit of this is we have been monitoring and managing networks for over 20 years so we'll go ahead and do this for them and do it in increments in 500 Gbps and above."

By having the ability to scale bandwidth on demand, customers can grow their networks with additional capacity and take advantage of technology enhancements as they become available.

For more:
- see the release

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