Telkom will be introducing Metro LAN in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town during March 2008.
Announcing the service, Godfrey Ntoele, Group Executive for National Sales and Marketing Operations, said that Metro LAN is hosted on Telkom's Metro Ethernet network. Metro LAN will provide high-speed connectivity between customer sites or branches in a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). The service will serve the metropolitan areas at speed from 4Mbps up to 600Mbps.
He said that bandwidth is scalable in small increments and when a bandwidth upgrade is required, the increase can be easily and cost effectively provisioned without the need to replace or upgrade equipment.
Explained Ntoele: "Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connectivity will initially only be offered within metropolitan areas (intra-metro). This will in future be extended to also include connectivity between the various metropolitan area networks (inter-metro)."
Customers, he continued, will have a single virtual connection or Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (VPN) between customer sites to differentiate traffic from other customers' traffic. "A Layer 2 VPN provides transparent connectivity between customer endpoints and enables privacy and security of data."
"New sites are simply connected to the existing Layer 2 VPN, making the provisioning of Metro LAN services to new sites less complex. It makes the Metro Ethernet Network look like an extension of the customer LAN," continued Ntoele.
He added that Telkom will supply and manage (as part of the service) the Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) at each site. "The CPE is directly connected to the Metro Ethernet Network via fibre and is a Layer 2 switch with the capability to convert the fibre input to Ethernet output and vice versa."
Other benefits to the customer include:
Metro LAN bandwidth can be added in small increments therefore you pay only for what you need.
Metro LAN offers high-speed connectivity between multiple sites.
Value-add Layer 3 services can be provisioned on top of the Metro LAN service.
Metro LAN integrates easily with existing infrastructure (LAN).
"The Metro Ethernet network is Quality of Service (QoS) enabled and offers bandwidth Class of Service (CoS) allocation that is scalable to customers' needs. Each CoS offers different levels of performance in terms of delay, jitter and loss," said Ntoele, adding that different CoSs typically include Real Time (for voice applications), Business (for mission critical business applications) and General Data (best effort for Internet browsing, e-mail, etc.).
He concluded that Telkom will always endeavour to seek services which will enhance customer experience at a cost effective price.
