Verizon Wholesale Offers Automated Optical Circuit Provisioning in NYC

Verizon launched a "Bandwidth on Demand" optical service in the New York City metropolitan region for wholesale customers. Offered through Verizon Partner Solutions, the new Bandwidth on Demand service promises to reduce the time it takes to establish DS-3 circuits as well as SONET and Ethernet circuits from weeks to hours and, in some cases, minutes. Verizon said it has modified its traditional ordering-and-billing processes to accommodate the flexibility of Bandwidth on Demand.



The new service leverages an intelligent control plane in the optical network. A request for a new circuit can be forwarded to a single control-plane- enabled network element, eliminating the need to perform a number of manual steps at multiple locations, as previously required. Instead, the request is routed to the appropriate end points of the proposed circuit, and intermediate control-plane network elements are queried for available bandwidth to establish the end-to-end circuit. Once the circuit path is successfully determined, cross-connects are automatically established in each network element, equipment options are provisioned, and service is generally established within a matter of hours, if not minutes.



Specifically, Verizon's Bandwidth on Demand is an implementation of an Optical Transport Network (OTN) architecture, which is an end-to-end all optical transport network including the loop and Interoffice Facility (IOF)) and Next Generation Add Drop Multiplexer (NGADM) network elements with control plane functionality. The implementation is based on ITU-T G.807 and G.8080 architectural guidelines.



Once an initial circuit for the wholesale customer is established, Verizon is allowing the customer to order and be billed for bandwidth that remains entirely on the Bandwidth on Demand network when they require it for as short a period as one day. Previously, customers had to purchase a dedicated, private-line facility over a longer period of time.



In the near future, Verizon Partner Solutions also plans to offer what is known as a dynamic reroute option. With this option, single-path designs would be used through the network, with the ability to automatically and dynamically reroute data and voice traffic around a problem in the circuit's path.

http://www.verizon.com/wholesale/bandwidth