BT Expands Etherflow’s Reach

CEN Feature (Sep 22 2011)

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   BT recently began offering its Etherflow Global service to customers in seven Asia-Pac countries: Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, India, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The Layer 2 VPN service offers growing companies a “building block” approach to augment their networks using high-performance Ethernet services. Etherflow also complements BT’s MPLS service.

   While Etherflow is available to all customers, it is particularly well suited for organizations that demand exclusive control over their IP architectures or those wanting dedicated bandwidth to more than two sites, according to Manul Agarwal, BT Global Services’ regional product manager – Ethernet Services, Asia Pacific.

   Etherflow made its worldwide debut in 2010 and, with this latest deployment, is now available in 22 countries worldwide. By year’s end that number will increase to 28 countries as BT is in the process of rolling out Etherflow Global and Etherflow E-Line in six more countries: Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Norway, Poland, South Africa.

   “We also are launching Etherflow E-LAN to those same 28 countries in the same time frame,” says Agarwal.

   Grow with the flow

   A major benefit of Etherflow is that it enables BT customers to pay as the grow. They can buy and pay for required bandwidth as needed, whether it results from adding more sites to their networks or if they find an increased demand for bandwith to their existing sites. The upside is that they lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) in the each instance, Agarwal explains.

   Etherflow also enables customers to upgrade the bandwidth between their sites in granular increments of 1/5/10/50/100 Mbps at rates ranging between 2 Mbps and 1 Gbps.

   This level of flexibility helps BT’s customers avoid the futility of over-investing in legacy networks as they grow and expand their businesses into new geographic areas, he adds.

   A protocol agnostic service, Etherflow is useful in a wide range of applications, especially high-bandwidth applications. Companies that are looking to manage their own IP routing across the WAN or those that need data-center-friendly connectivity for high-bandwidth services such as DC mirroring, are keen to use Etherflow. Companies looking for uncontended, assured bandwidth also are prime customers.

   “Etherflow offers our customers choice as we see more and more of them building hybrid networks with a mix of Layer 2 and Layer 3 services,” says Agarwal.

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