PPL Telcom (Booth 805), a Pennsylvania-based transport provider serving wholesale carriers and large enterprises, is rolling out IP services beginning in March, according to carrier services executives at the company, which provides broadband connections to telecom companies, ISPs and large businesses and institutions.

PPL currently provides Gigabit Ethernet and SONET services to East Coast markets in the New York City-Washington. D.C., corridor. Last year, the company expanded its OC192 DWDM network route miles by 180 percent and nearly doubled its number of on-net locations through the acquisition of the Cambrian Communication’s assets. That move allowed PPL Telcom to extend its central and eastern Pennsylvania network to northern Virginia, Baltimore, Baltimore County, Washington, D.C., Newark and New York City.

Charles Boddy, manager of marketing for PPL Telcom, says the company will be targeting ISPs and carriers as well as enterprise customers for its new IP services, which range from a T1 (1.5mbps) to a full Gigabit Ethernet circuit.

The IP service will debut in eight Pennsylvania metro areas within the reach of PPL Telcom?s regional OC192 network. These include Allentown, Scranton, Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Williamsport, Wilkes-Barre and Reading, says product manager Nitin Krishna, adding PPL Telcom will be looking to expand its IP services into NFL cities such as New York and Washington in the second or third quarter of this year.

Krishna says the IP service was designed with the enterprise in mind and can accommodate different interface protocols, such as Ethernet, as on-ramps to the network. He says the SLAs and contracts will be competitive. A licensed CAP, PPL Telcom is able to go directly into the customer?s premise with private line or Ethernet access using either its own facilities or a partner?s.

?In addition to the enterprise market, we also will be focusing on ISPs in Tier 2 and 3 cities,? says Boddy, noting the service could be used as part of their upstream backbone. Krishna explains that for an ISP selling dialup or high-speed Internet access, PPL Telcom could offer bandwidth, such as 10mbps or higher, to aggregate the ISP?s traffic from those accounts. ?ISPs can slice and dice this aggregated bandwidth and make that into 24kbps-56kbps if they have to. That?s one model we are looking at,? he says. Carriers also will be a focus once the company moves into larger metro areas New York, Washington, Philadelphia and New Jersey later this year.

PPL Telcom plans to broaden the services that are part of its IP portfolio as well. ?We definitely have a roadmap. IP offerings is just a first step,? says Krishna, citing VPNs and spam filtering as examples of complementary offers. These services also will be available to ISPs and carriers on a wholesale basis as available.