Verizon Beefs Up Wholesale, Takes Sides In Level3/Comcast Dispute

Verizon’s Global Wholesale division has been busy this week.  I always find it a bit hard to cover Verizon’s, they’re so big it’s hard to isolate a particular storyline that doesn’t involve consumer wireless stuff.  But if I just think of it as MCI or uunet, it gets easier.

Yesterday the international networking giant unveiled upgrades to its transparent LAN services, including extra bandwidth, combined point-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint virtual connections, pre-configured circuits, and the ability to provision transport over SONET.  None of those are earth-shattering by themselves, but the company is clearly beefing up its feature set for such metro LAN services.

Now today, Verizon Global Wholesale enhanced its Private IP processes.  Amongst other tweaks, they have added new speeds and interconnection choices, an improved view into statistics reflecting the health of customer networks, and better provisioning processes.  Sounds like they’re retooling for the next round in the corporate managed services space.

Verizon also took sides in the Level3/Comcast standoff last week.  Given that Verizon has a huge last mile footprint, it was absolutely no surprise that they concurred with Comcast’s point of view virtually down to the last letter.  It’s still odd though, seeing the two long-term opponents marching in lock-step so often nowadays.  I always get a kick out of reading FCC filings by Verizon and AT&T.  It’s like entering a parallel dimension where there is lots and lots of last mile competition and no need for regulation at all.

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Categories: Internet Backbones