CE in CE: GTS Evangelizes Carrier Ethernet Across Central Europe

CEN Feature (Jul 26 2012) Managed Data Services , Wholesale , Regional , Wholesale / Exchange

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   The CE after GTS’s name stands for Central Europe, but it might as well mean Carrier Ethernet. In December 2009, GTS launched Carrier Ethernet services in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and its home country of Poland. The rollout is noteworthy for a few reasons, including the scale and being the first of its kind in the region.

   “We didn’t do it in just one city or one country,” says Ignacio Irurita, who joined GTS as CTO in 2008. “We deployed flat across five countries at the same time.”

   Irurita came from Colt, which had the selection of Ethernet services that he thought GTS should begin offering. That strategy paid off almost immediately.

   “We started to see plenty of demand for this kind of services coming from our wholesale customers, the likes of Colt, Verizon, BT and Sprint,” Irurita says. “They were requesting termination of the services in some of the metropolitan areas in Central and East Europe.

   “That demand was served before by Ethernet over SDH. Of course, SDH was the not the most effective way to implement these type of services.”

   Today, GTS provides Carrier Ethernet services to its operator and enterprise customers over a variety of access technologies: about 60 percent over fiber, 30 percent on microwave and the rest over copper. The choice depends on what’s available to a particular customer in a particular place. Irurita says many enterprises are connected by all three technologies.

   “When we deliver an Ethernet Layer 2 VPN, some of the locations are connected on fiber,” Irurita says. “Some go on radio. Some of them go on copper, depending on the bandwidth and location.

   “The service needs to be seamless for the customer. They need to feel that it works exactly the same in all of their places. So you have to configure your network to be able to deliver this seamless service across the different access technologies.”

   Selling QoS

   As it deployed Carrier Ethernet, GTS also revamped the way that it configures services so it could turn them up faster and with lower overhead costs.

   “With the previous technology, we needed to go section by section and trail by trail in order to do the configuration,” Irurita says. “[Now] we’re able to provision our Ethernet services even faster.”

   In January 2011, GTS launched Performance Monitoring Service, which provides Carrier Ethernet customers with a Web portal for monitoring QoS metrics such as latency and packet loss. Customers also can check their bandwidth usage.

   “Some of the customers use it,” Irurita says. “No company was doing this in the region.”

   Later in 2011, GTS became the first operator in central and eastern Europe to receive MEF 9 and MEF 14 certification. That’s been helpful for educating customers that are still learning about Carrier Ethernet because GTS can point to the role that the MEF plays as an international organization.

   “It helps to make the QoSmore tangible for the customer,” Irurita says.

   GTS also can point to several awards over the past few years as examples of how it’s delivering on QoS. Some are from the MEF, such as Regional Service Provider of the Year in 2011, while others are from publications and partners, such as Cable&Wireless Worldwide’s EMEA Partner of the Year in 2010. 

   Branching Out

   For wholesale customers, another innovation was Ethernet NNIs, which GTS operates in countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Romania. GTS interconnects with operators in Frankfort and Vienna.

   “This is a real advantage for them,” Irurita says.

   In October 2011, GTS joined the Equinix Carrier Ethernet Exchange (ECEE).

   “We don’t see demand yet, but it is only a matter of time,” Irurita says. “We’re there and we’re very interested, but today much of the traffic comes from one-to-one connections from the carriers.” 

   Meanwhile, GTS continues to look for ways to expand its role as the go-to service provider for foreign operators that want to add service in central and eastern Europe. For example, GTS has cross-border fiber routes into Russia, the Balkans and the Baltic States, but it doesn’t own networks in those countries.

   “So one of the things we are try to develop more is interconnections in the network countries that we have around the five countries in central Europe,” Irurita says. “[The local operators] are going through a learning process with us about how to establish an interconnection, the QoS parameters, these types of things, because it’s very important for some of our customers to get a line in Croatia or Slovenia or Belarus.

   “For that, you have to have plenty of certified connections in every one of these countries. It’s challenging, but we’re getting it.”

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