Rollout: Verizon E-VPLS Service

Connecting remote sites is such a painful process most network engineers would rather undergo a root canal than hook up distant offices. Configuring bandwidth, setting QoS levels, and ensuring security can be time consuming and expensive as you parse various carrier options and haggle over SLAs.

Enter Verizon Business' Ethernet Virtual Private LAN Service (E-VPLS). Targeted at the Fortune 100, it lets customers get Layer 2, point-to-multipoint Ethernet connectivity throughout the lower 48 states. Expansion to the rest of North America is on the drawing board.

With an Ethernet service, customers can use existing switches or routers to connect sites, and avoid the teeth-pulling that usually accompanies running some protocols over conventional leased lines. Verizon also claims the service is less expensive than the leased-line option.

Ethernet Across AmericaE-VPLS offers transmission speeds ranging from 1 Mbps to 1 Gbps, with an eye toward 10 Gbps. Links from 1 Mbps to 8 Mbps can be purchased in 1-Mbps increments. Any bandwidth beyond that can be purchased in 5-Mbps units.

Verizon offers E-VPLS anywhere inside its service area across the continental United States. In areas where it isn't the incumbent provider, it leases the facilities needed to provide the service. Verizon will adjust the service price depending on the costs it accrues to lease facilities.

To implement the service, Verizon installs and manages switches at each end of the customers' connections so that it can ensure the SLA and provide reliability similar to what customers have with non-Ethernet links.

Classy ServiceE-VPLS is suitable for VoIP; the company says average round-trip delay is 100 milliseconds. For those that want QoS, Verizon offers four classes of service: Basic Data, Business Data, Priority Data and Real Time Data. Verizon will levy additional charges for traffic in the Real Time Data class.

E-VPLS also works with VLANs independent of these service classes. Customers have two options. First, E-VPLS can be provisioned to preserve only specific company VLANs across the service. The internal auditing VLAN could be provisioned so that an auditor in Boston, for instance, would appear to be on the same segment as an auditor from Dallas, but with no other VLANs connected. Second, the company could choose the transparency option, where the E-VPLS service will pass all VLAN tags.

Verizon says it has no plans to offer sub-1-Mbps bandwidth options. However, it does offer the Real Time Data class of service in bandwidth increments as low at 64 Kbps.

As mentioned, E-VPLS can be used behind a router or simply connected to standard Ethernet switches. Verizon provides two free MAC addresses on either end. More MAC addresses can be had, for a fee, in blocks of 50. This means that using switches instead of routers for E-VPLS will add to the cost of the service. Each device that communicates across the network uses a MAC address in a switched environment. If you connect two 1,000 user sites, you'll need to buy at least 2,000 MAC addresses. Most customers will likely opt for routers.

Verizon uses MPLS to implement E-VPLS. The service also supports unicast, multicast and broadcast packets. Note that multicast and broadcast packets can be only up to 15 percent of the total bandwidth.Prices vary depending on customer needs. Verizon quotes a figure of approximately $48,000 per month to connect six sites spread across the United States, with bandwidth ranging from 100 Mbps to 10 Mbps per site. This price accounts for an average of 10 percent of the bandwidth per site using the Real Time Data service class to support real-time applications. Verizon says its price tag for this scenario is 25 percent less expensive than leased lines in a hub-and-spoke arrangement. The usual caveats apply to such claims, but it is likely the E-VPLS service will be cheaper not just in monthly fees, but in the reduced complexity of the solution. n

Steven J. Schuchart Jr. is Network Computing's Managing Technology Editor. He was formerly an analyst for competitive intelligence firm current analysis. Write to him at [email protected].