Verizon Business Pushes EPRS Story

Verizon Business this week is pushing its Ethernet over SONET story, publicizing the fact that as of last month it began offering Ethernet Packet Ring Service (EPRS) nationwide, and talking about the interoffice savings it and its customers will see as a result of “next-generation SONET” technology.

EPRS, which is designed to avoid a single point of failure and provides flexible and scalable Ethernet handoffs at each location connected to the link, uses RPR to bring a private switch Ethernet cloud into a SONET ring, said Dan Rila, senior product manager for advanced data services at Verizon Business. The cool thing about EPRS, he explained, is that it enables customers to add Ethernet onto their existing SONET facilities in a more efficient way than was possible as early as a year ago.

“If you step back to the pre-EPRS days, even a year ago, if you wanted bring Ethernet across that ring, you burned up a lot of SONET channels to do that,” said Rila.

For example, traditionally, to install a 150mbps connection across two of a customer’s sites would require the service provider to take 150mbps off of the entire SONET ring, he said. EPRS, however, uses that bandwidth only between the sites for which the Ethernet link is being used. That means more efficient utilization of a customer’s SONET infrastructure, resulting in lower costs for both Verizon and its customers.

Alla Reznik, Verizon Business’ group manager for Ethernet and IP services, continued that the new next-generation SONET capabilities of her company’s network, which basically just describes the capabilities of ROADM technology the company has recently deployed, eliminates interoffice interconnection costs for Verizon and its customers. That’s because instead of interconnecting central offices serving remote customer sites with central offices serving the same customer’s headquarters sites via interoffice facilities, it uses ROADM-based facilities for the CO-to-CO connectivity.

“They interwork with this metro Ethernet, so the SONET infrastructure we already have in place and the fiber infrastructure appear as one,” said Reznik. “Then we take that combination of the two, translating it into benefits for ourselves because now we don’t have to build fiber parallel to an existing fiber path, and we’re translating it to benefit customers” who now don’t have to pay for both SONET and fiber facilities.

Rila said the elimination of these interoffice facilities charges for the customer can result in savings of around $5,000 per month per remote location.

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