Qwest E-Line offering delivers dedicated bandwidth

From USTelecomdailylead -

A new point-to-point Ethernet offering from Qwest dubbed iQ E-Line service, announced today, provides customers with end-to-end dedicated bandwidth, said Eric Bozich, vice president of Qwest National Network Services in an interview with Connected Planet.


It enables the kinds of applications we see customers looking for such as disaster recovery, data replication between data centers and mission-critical business applications, said Bozich.

Service rides on DWDM

The new service rides on top of Qwest's nationwide dense wavelength division multiplex (DWDM) network, relying on multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) for bonding and concatenation of circuits.

We're leveraging customer premises equipment (CPE) that provides granularity and gives flexibility in the loop technology, Bozich said. That equipment can support a wide range of incremental data rates, enabling customers to upgrade bandwidth speeds with a programming change, provided that their access link has sufficient bandwidth. The new E-Line service can be ordered at rates ranging from 5 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s.

The CPE underlying Qwest's offering can support a wide range of access options including Sonet, DS-1 and metro Ethernet, said Bozich. The benefit to them is that the presentation is Ethernet, he said.

From the customer premises, traffic is carried back to one of 16 Qwest points of presence nationwide that are nodes on the carrier's DWDM network. At that point, the customer's connection is aggregated with other connections, with bandwidth dedicated to each customer based on what the customer has ordered.

This approach enables Qwest to provide service level agreements and, because no queuing is required, latency is minimized, Bozich said.

E-Line vs. Ethernet private line

Until now, Qwest has offered point-to-point Ethernet only through a Sonet-based offering, which the company calls Ethernet private line. In that offering, the CPE converts the Sonet signal into Ethernet for the customer, Bozich explained.

Because it does not rely on Sonet, the new E-Line service uses bandwidth more efficiently, making it more cost-effective, Bozich said. He added, though, that some customers likely will prefer the Ethernet private line offering because it supports Sonet's inherent self-restoration capabilities.

Customers relying on DWDM connectivity, Bozich said, are designing in their own redundancy, with alternate and primary paths and diverse routing.

Qwest did not need to make any major network upgrades to support the new E-Line offering, Bozich said. But the CPE supporting the offering is new to Qwest, he said. The carrier has not revealed which manufacturer is supplying that equipment.