Security Featured Article

AT&T Expands Global Reach for Ethernet Portfolio

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

AT&T (News - Alert) has announced it expanded the global reach for its Ethernet portfolio with the

immediate availability of a virtual private local area network service in 14 countries across Europe and Asia Pac.

 

AT&T's VPLS service, called OPT-E-WAN, lets businesses link multiple locations – next door, three continents over – with a flat Ethernet wide area network that can be extended globally. 

 

The service is now available in 15 countries – the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Switzerland in Europe and Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore and Japan in Asia Pacific.

 

 

OPT-E-WAN uses the same Ethernet interfaces and so global businesses will have the requisite flexibility to mix and match bandwidth and security among locations. “This will allow network managers to assign network resources across the virtual local area networks with a level of sophistication not possible before,” claim AT&T officials.

 

Demand for Ethernet services worldwide, whatever the name on the continent, continues to expand. This growth is obviously being driven by businesses looking for affordable and easy-to-manage bandwidth to support their enterprise applications, including disaster recovery, storage and converged voice and video.

About a month ago TMC’s Tom Keating (News - Alert) reported that AT&T unveiled a tiered broadband service in Nevada.

“According to a Friday filing with the Federal Communication Commission, AT&T executives met with the legal adviser to FCC (News - Alert) Chairman Kevin Martin to discuss "usage-based pricing" as a form of network management,” Keating wrote.

AT&T warned customers involved in the trial explaining that their broadband service will be subject to “a certain monthly usage tier” for the total amount of data they may send and receive, as well as a per gigabyte charge in the event they exceed the usage tier. 

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi