Global Capacity is wasting no time making use out of the wholesale assets it purchased from MegaPath last fall, announcing that it is now offering MPLS VPN service through its One Marketplace network backbone.
One of the initial advantages that Global Capacity can bring to the table for new and existing wholesale customers is scale. The service provider now can reach more than 9.6 million business addresses with the expanded national presence.
Mary Stanhope, vice president of marketing for Global Capacity, told FierceTelecom this move is part of the evolution of the acquisition of MegaPath's wholesale business.
"The MPLS VPN product that MegaPath's Network Services was able to take to market is currently available with back end automation, up front pricing and design. We're now able to take that MPLS technology and service and put it over the fully integrated One Marketplace core network," Stanhope said. "This includes all of the Global Capacity PoPs and aggregated connectivity as well as across the potential connectivity options whether that be T-1 or Ethernet access services."
It also has a larger wholesale customer base to offer the service. When it completed the acquisition of the MegaPath wholesale assets, Global Capacity gained access to more than 400 new wholesale customers and over 20,000 small business Dedicated Access customers.
With the MegaPath assets now integrated into its own fold, the service provider now has a total of 41 points of presence (PoPs), 86 local aggregation PoPs, 2,007 central offices (COs) and over 4,513 last-mile network interconnections to deliver coverage to what it says is 98 percent of the U.S. business market and widespread availability of a fully managed MPLS VPN service.
"This is all part of having the greatest amount of coverage in our network, now covering 98 percent of the U.S., which we calculate as 9.6 million business addresses. We're able to deliver that service over that footprint," Stanhope said. "Our network is coming together, it's covering all these points, and we're able to put our new products across it."
Customers can choose a host of incremental bandwidth options ranging from 1 Mbps up to 1 Gbps, all of which contain five QoS levels. Since Global Capacity can support multiple VPN services over the same access connection, they can help an enterprise "simplify complex virtual network environments."
Stanhope said the new offering addresses how enterprises want to build a wide area network for their multi-location business.
"What we're hoping to do is to continue to reinforce and validate that the value of what One Marketplace is that it is diverse technology and the right connectivity to your location to build the right network that you need," Stanhope said. "Wide area networks are moving away from the day where you took your 100-200 addresses and handed them over to your local LEC... We can now say going into that data center I need carrier Ethernet and run multiple services and aggregate my services across that connectivity for efficiency, performance and cost effectiveness."
Stanhope added that out of the 500 offices one customer may have, not all offices may require a high-end Ethernet-based MPLS connection. They may only need a lower speed Internet connection.
"Of those 500 addresses, 300 of them are small remote offices that I can sustain with Internet connectivity so it may not be that I need 500 MPLS address so what's the right way to create that hybrid WAN environment," Stanhope said. "For a lot of our wholesale customers, particularly the regional ones, this allows them to gain a national coverage they wouldn't have been able to do and sell an MPLS product where before without having that coverage you could not be competitive."
Global Capacity is hardly alone in its wholesale MPLS desires, however.
EarthLink Carrier has also introduced a similar wholesale Multi-Service Aggregation (MSAG) platform that can provide a single network interconnect capable of aggregating EarthLink Carrier MPLS network-to-network interconnection (NNI) and EarthLink Carrier E-Access products, for example.
For more:
- see the release
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