Verizon Business has significantly expanded their Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), making it the Layer 2 Ethernet service available throughout its POPs in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America.  Enterprise IT/LAN managers can now go control-freak crazy, provisioning offices around the globe with the same IP/Ethernet service, including implementing their own IP addresses and all sorts of other nifty things.

VPLS is a MPLS-based layer 2 VPN on top of the company’s Ethernet platform and is protocol independent, so customers retain complete control of their own routing.  In a world of professional paranoia and fewer available IPv4 addresses, being able to run your own Ethernet and IP addressing is a Good Thing for simplified management and security purposes.

Since VPLS is MPLS-based, you get CoS — classes of services.  An organization can customize priorities for different apps, so VoIP and video can get priority over email and other less latency-sensitive traffic.  VPLS also allows customers to provision their network traffic from 1 Mbps to 1 GBps and beyond — a few customers have already made noises about 10 Gbps for linking data centers.

One point not emphasized in the press release but underlined in a media briefing is Verizon Business has carefully certified Ethernet providers in over 120 countries, so while the office in Argentina or Cape Town might not be next to a Verizon POP, the carrier has a “known good” business partner to provide Ethernet into its network for VPLS service; to repeat the cliche’ of the week – Verizon Business VPLS becomes the one “throat to choke” (a.k.a. single point of contact) for network connectivity.