Frontier Communications Rolls Out Wholesale Ethernet

CEN Feature (Feb 14 2013) Wholesale / Exchange

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   Frontier Communications recently announced the availability of its first wholesale Ethernet offering. Ethernet Private Line (EVPL) Silver is a best-effort service initially available in 23 of the 27 states in Frontier’s footprint, according to Lisa Partridge, product manager for Frontier. The carrier also is re-branding its retail best-effort Ethernet service with the same name, she added. 

   Frontier plans to greatly expand its wholesale portfolio during the next 18 months. Meanwhile, the carrier’s EVPL Silver service will provide wholesale customers with Ethernet interfaces of 10/100/1000 Mbps, and scalable throughput of 1 Mbps up to a full 1 Gigabit.

   Frontier’s foray into wholesale Ethernet was preceded by a company-wide conversion to a single operations support system (OSS). The conversion began after the acquisition of Verizon facilities in 14 states, which occurred in July 2010 and was completed in 2012 almost a year ahead of schedule, said Partridge.

   “We had marketing material, provisioning systems, billing and testing capabilities established for our retail offering, so we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “Some basic enhancements in our back offices allowed us to offer carrier customers the same capabilities as our retail customers.”

   Frontier’s Ethernet network now operates seamlessly on a national platform across all of the company’s properties, said Partridge. The company’s wholesale clients are the nation’s top tier service providers and they now have standardized pricing, availability maps, and specific, yet flexible, ordering and implementation criteria, she added.

   Frontier plans to deploy multipoint-to-multipoint Ethernet LAN (ELAN) next, said Partridge. There is high demand for this service in both the retail and wholesale channels, so it will be named similarly and rolled out to both channels at the same time, she added. Gold and Platinum services that provide customers with a variety of classes of service, reporting capabilities and web portals will follow.

   “We’ll move from best-effort service to priority class, and eventually to real-time service with high-end functionality and features the latter part of this year,” said Partridge.

   Frontier’s wholesale Ethernet offer enables the carrier to provide its customers with the nationwide service and flexible private contracts they have been requesting, she said.

   “We’re excited about this product because it responds to our customers’ needs, opens the door to more possibilities, and gives us the ability to serve more customers and gain market share,” said Partridge. “Our customers need to serve their customers, and Frontier Ethernet gives them all of that and more.”

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