Communications giant Comcast announced Metro Ethernet services as part of an ongoing strategy to expand its portfolio of business services to meet the requirements of larger customers. Targeted at midsize businesses with 20-500 employees, Comcast’s Metro Ethernet services provide access to the company’s fiber optic network for businesses with high-bandwidth needs and often multiple locations. The services are now available in more than 20 major U.S. markets, with expansion into new markets planned in the months ahead.
Comcast Metro Ethernet services are delivered using the company’s fiber-based IP network. Comcast delivers bandwidth from 1M bps up to 10G bps that can be remotely scaled in increments of 1M bps, 10M bps, 100M bps or 1G bps, and offered with three different classes of service. Comcast is the first carrier of Metro Ethernet services to have all three certifications from the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF 9, 14 and 18), which are backed by service level agreements, and monitored 24/7 from Comcast’s dedicated network operations centers.
Delivered from a network featuring more than 147,000 miles of fiber optic cable and serving 20 of the nation’s 25 largest markets, Comcast offers four Metro Ethernet Services, including Ethernet Private Line Service, point-to-point connectivity between two customer sites for bandwidth-intensive applications and Ethernet Virtual Private Line Service, a point-to-multipoint connection that allows customers to tailor bandwidth, performance characteristics and cost to meet the needs of their applications.
The other two services are Ethernet Network Service, which offers multipoint-to-multipoint connectivity to connect organizations with high-bandwidth requirements and multiple locations across Comcast’s network and Ethernet Dedicated Internet Access Service, for continuous, high-bandwidth connectivity between customers’ LANs and the public Internet.
"As mid-sized businesses increasingly operate within a virtualized IT environment of cloud and SAAS resources to improve productivity and reduce operational expenses, their demand for secure, reliable and high-performance connectivity will continue to grow,” said Sandra Palumbo, a research fellow at Yankee Group. “This market segment has high-bandwidth requirements across multiple sites and values the lower cost of ownership, simplicity and scalable capacity of Metro Ethernet. Significant last mile networks and investments in advanced Carrier Ethernet network infrastructure are vital.”
For more, read the eWEEK article: Comcast Introduces Metro Ethernet Services for SMBs.