BellSouth Launches Nationwide Business Data Service

BellSouth Corp. has launched a nationwide data service for businesses. BellSouth Managed Network VPN service utilizes the security and flexibility of MPLS to allow internetworking of multiple access methods across carrier networks for a consistent customer experience in any service location.

Many businesses have the challenge of linking multiple office facilities broadly distributed throughout the country to corporate resources. Each location often has specific network access requirements, and often companies have had to self-integrate and manage these disparate networks across the organization. Customers also had to purchase more costly point-to-point circuits or rely on a hub-and-spoke architecture that routed all traffic between outlying locations back through headquarter sites.

BellSouth’s nationwide service provides a managed network-based solution for all of the customer’s service locations. The MPLS-based IP routing of BellSouth Managed Network VPN creates a full mesh-data network, allowing each customer site to communicate directly with any of the other locations, and conserving headquarters bandwidth for corporate functions.

BellSouth Managed Network VPN customers can designate traffic into four different classes: real-time, interactive, priority business and best-effort. Real-time and interactive classes are suitable for applications that have a low tolerance for delays, such as voice and video. Priority business and best-effort are used to distinguish higher priority business data from noncritical applications such as e-mail and general Web surfing.

BellSouth has responded to customer demands and has extended its premium networking service to better meet the needs of national enterprise customers, said Lee Priest, vice president of business marketing for BellSouth. Based on our research, BellSouth Managed Network VPN is the only solution on the market that combines MPLS, class-of-service offerings and proactive service level agreements.

Class-of-service routing provides for additional convergence by allowing enterprises to assign higher priority to VoIP, video and imaging applications. With a variety of voice and data applications riding alongside each other, it is crucial to have a network that identifies and differentiates traffic types, according to BellSouth.