MegaPath’s Carrier Ethernet-over-Copper Expansion Could Give Company an Edge

CEN Feature (Oct 11 2012) Wholesale , National , Wholesale / Exchange

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   MegaPath has some strong differentiation points now that the company has completed the build-out of what it believes is the largest Ethernet-over-copper footprint in the U.S.

   As Pasha Mohammed, Vice President of Product Management, Network Services, explained in an interview this week, MegaPath can now deliver Carrier Ethernet over copper services from 693 central offices nationwide. To support this capability, the company co-located a Carrier Ethernet access platform in each central office and also increased capacity on its MPLS backbone network to support traffic from the COs.

   The company offers both wholesale and commercial services and its value proposition is a bit different in each of these markets and in various segments of each of these markets.

   Wholesale approach

   MegaPath’s wholesale customers include Layer 2 carriers, Layer 3 carriers, Carrier Ethernet exchange operators, application service providers (ASPs) and Internet service providers (ISPs).

   Customers in the latter two categories like MegaPath because the company provides an attractive price per megabit and can deliver access connectivity from end user locations to the ASP’s or ISP’s closest point of presence using a combination of last-mile and backbone facilities, Mohammed said.

   “Because of our nationwide footprint and our reach to the last mile, our network is very attractive to ASPs and ISPs,” he said. “‘Our network as your network’ is the model that we use.”

   For their part, Layer 2 and Layer 3 carriers and Carrier Ethernet exchange operators like the fact that they can connect to MegaPath’s network at just a few points to gain connectivity to virtually any building served from any of the COs in which MegaPath has co-located.

   “We don’t need them to connect to us at the CO level,” explained Mohammed. “We aggregate traffic from a bunch of COs into an Ethernet hub and let wholesale partners connect to us at those hubs. . . It saves them a ton of cost.”

   Sometimes MegaPath customers need connectivity to an end user location that MegaPath doesn’t serve, but there too the carrier has a solution.

   “We have relationships with other providers,” Mohammed said. “They buy from us and we buy from them. We take advantage of that kind of capability to serve those off-net locations. We bring the traffic onto our network and treat it the same way as on-net traffic. . . We call it our Ethernet Service Area and we can provide a solution to anywhere on the continent.”

   Wholesale providers also have considerable flexibility in how they connect to MegaPath – including Carrier Ethernet network-to-network interfaces, inter-carrier MPLS connections and Layer 3 options. The latter are of interest to customers that don’t need to receive all of a customer’s traffic, Mohammed explained. He cited the example of a company that offers an IP-based voice service offering that might want to only get the customer’s voice traffic and not other IP traffic.

   Commercial customers

   MegaPath’s commercial customers include small to medium size businesses as well as larger enterprises – particularly “companies that are really large and are supported by multiple smaller locations,” Mohammed said.

   “Retail customers typically have a single pipe that needs to connect to the Internet and that’s a slam dunk,” he continued. As with the ASPs and ISPs, MegaPath can handle the connection end to end, ultimately converting traffic to IP and “plugging it in to the Internet,” said Mohammed.

   Some retail customers require a higher level of customization, however. “An end user might say ‘I have four locations and want to securely connect them. And from one location I need to get to the Internet.’ By using MPLS, managed security, and a T-1 bonded connection we could pitch a solution custom fit for them.”

   MegaPath’s building blocks for these solutions include point-to-point as well as point-to-multipoint services underpinned by the company’s MPLS network.

   In the future, however, MegaPath envisions more demand for pure Ethernet solutions, and the company is working toward being able to support that demand, Mohammed said. He noted that customers are beginning to ask for pure Ethernet solutions because they believe it gives them a higher layer of security in comparison with MPLS, which relies more heavily on shared facilities.

   To date, “customers haven’t realized the potential of pure Ethernet,” said Mohammed. Because Carrier Ethernet service isn’t available to all locations, customers sometimes need to use a non-Ethernet approach such as bonded T-1s for some connections.

   But as Carrier Ethernet becomes more widely available and better understood, Mohammed believes it ultimately will create a “transformed industry.”

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