We’re developing a complete portfolio of next generation services to harness the power of BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) and meet the fast-evolving connectivity needs of Providers and their business customers.  Wholesale Ethernet is the first product to launch on 21CN.

WHAT’S THE MARKET POTENTIAL?

Ethernet is forecast to be the UK’s fastest growing access technology in terms of spend between now and 2012, according to a recent report from leading communications industry commentators Analysys*. Following on from a year in which demand for the technology grew by 27%, Analysys predict a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 16% for the next four years. It’s evidence that Ethernet has advanced from an early adopter to a mainstream purchase for business customers looking for a cheaper, faster and more versatile single platform solution for their wide area networking (WAN) or local area networking (LAN) needs.

WHAT’S ON OFFER?

BT Wholesale Ethernet represents a landmark. It’s both the first product to launch in BT Wholesale’s new 21CN portfolio and the first Ethernet-based solution in the UK marketplace built using the 21CN platform topology.

Add BT Wholesale Ethernet to your own portfolio and you can gain a number of important competitive advantages – not least the reputation of providing innovative solutions as a provider on Next Generation Network connectivity solutions.

LOWER COSTS

For your business customers, BT Wholesale Ethernet offers the cost efficiencies inherent in Ethernet of not being distance dependent (with the exception of the local access). But it also complements these with the lower costs that come as standard in 21CN solutions when organisations evolve and need to change the size, configuration and speed of their networks. There are also potential savings to be made by running all of a company’s multiple applications – fixed line voice, VoIP, data and IP – over a single platform.

We also recognise that ‘lower costs’ are a vital consideration for your own operation in helping you to maximise revenues. With BT Wholesale Ethernet you get not only a product that’s created for the wholesale market at a genuine wholesale price, equipping you to achieve your required margins. It also has the potential to cut your own access costs and extend your reach without major capital investment by means of the 106 national Metro nodes that we plan to establish by June 2008. The network will eventually expand to up to 1100 Ethernet access nodes UK-wide.

'RIGHT SIZE' VERSATILITY

Your business customers might want higher speeds for increasingly bandwidth-hungry data and video applications but they also want easy scalability on a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ basis. This is what BT Wholesale Ethernet delivers. It offers higher bandwidth speeds than were previously available from the BT Ethernet portfolio, together with the versatility of more gentle step changes in the speed increments compared with other technology solutions. This means that you can now ‘right size’ your solutions for each customer at a cost-effective price, choosing from a current circuit bandwidth range of 1Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s.

Similarly, BT Wholesale Ethernet now offers access speeds of 10Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s and 1Gbit/s and there are future plans to add a 10Gbit/s option to the product.

To find out more about BT Wholesale Ethernet, please use the links on the right to download a more detailed description of the product and the technical product handbook.

* Analysys Research: Business Data Services, Growth Opportunities 2007-2012. (June 2007).