News Briefs

Wholesale provider Teleglobe International Holdings Ltd. is offering its regional ISP clients managed network services from Virtela Communications Inc., a network solutions company. ISP customers of Teleglobe will be able to offer Layer 3 VPN services to their enterprise customers. The deal calls for Teleglobe to market and sell Virtela’s IP VPN technology to regional ISPs whose subscribers require VPN reach across multiple networks. “Teleglobe’s regional ISP clients have enterprise customers that increasingly require global services,” says Christian Michaud, vice president of marketing at Teleglobe. “This [agreement] enables our ISP clients to effectively compete with the single global network L3VPN providers and to retain their local enterprise customers in need of a global footprint L3VPN.”

Meet-me-room operator The telx Group Inc. and Stealth Communications Inc., which owns the Voice Peering Fabric, have launched The Big Apple Peering Exchange, or The Big APE, at telx New York’s interconnection facility at 60 Hudson St., creating one of the largest Internet peering points in the world. The project relies on the Force10 E-Series, which the companies say delivers the gigabit and 10 gigabit Ethernet performance required to provide costeffective peering services. Initial participants include eircom; Net2Phone; Progress Telecom; PPL Corp.; WV Fiber; and Stealth Communications Inc.

PPL Corp., a Pennsylvania-based transport provider serving wholesale carriers and large enterprises, has added Shadow Port service to its IP product line. The company describes Shadow Port as an IP back-up technology that meets no-single-pointof- failure requirements. Typically, a company pays for connections to multiple entrances into the building, with two local loops and two physical IP ports, both of which are always active, PPL says. PPLs pricing includes regular charges for the local loops and an active IP port, and a separate Shadow Port charge. The company says this provides the necessary redundancy and availability levels, but keeps costs low by avoiding an extra full-priced IP port. Shadow Port service includes a 99.999 percent availability SLA, an IP block per port, and DNS and mail bagging services if needed.

Inmarsat Ltd., which operates a satellite network and distributes much of its products and airtime wholesale, is launching a new version of one of its services through top partner Telenor Satellite Services, a subsidiary of Telenor ASA of Norway. Telenor will become a premier service provider for Inmarsats Broadband Global Area Network, or BGAN. BGAN will launch commercially this year; it will offer high-speed, circuit-switched and packet data services, as well as voice telephony. Inmarsat used a new generation of satellites known as Inmarsat 4 to develop the new capabilities.

Interoute Communications Ltd. is opening a commission-free trading floor to help members of its year-old Virtual Voice Network (VVN) exchange traffic directly without costs normally associated with interconnections. Called Arena, the trading exchange is a secure extranet available only to participants in the VVN, Interoute’s managed softswitch partitioning and interconnection service. A circuit into VVN allows members to instantly trade with other VVN members in the Arena, no matter which of the 25 locations - including Washington D.C. and New York City - they are connected to and which protocol they are using. VNN eliminates the geographic considerations since all interconnects are virtual within the Interoute IP signaling network. VVN also handles IP-TDM traffic conversion.