Eleven years after the initial introduction of service based on
frame relay, a then high-speed packet switching protocol, WorldCom
has introduced two frame relay data services.
It has repackaged the service to attract small to mid-size business
customers and retain existing customers, a pattern that has become
familiar among service providers.
"Last year, everyone was trying to get enterprises to move to new
services. This year, they're just trying to keep them," said
Maribel Dolinov, a senior telecom analyst with Forrester Research.
The two services combine the cost of the customer premise equipment
on site, the ports and the circuits in one price tag.
This is a significant departure from the old pricing structure that
had enterprises purchasing CPEs, then paying per circuit and per
port on a monthly basis.
David Natho, senior director of data service at WorldCom claimed
the latest offerings address what customers have been asking for -
a cheaper and less complex frame relay solution.
"How the telecom dollar is spent today is much different than six
months ago or even two years ago," said Natho. "Today enterprises
want good value for their money."
WorldCom's latest solutions are referred to as Bundled Frame Relay
and Economy Frame Relay.
The former is not quite a frame relay transport service, according
to Natho, but a WAN solution for customers still using .x25,
private lines or even dial-up.
The service offers speeds up to 1.5Mbps and is now on one- to
two-year contracts. Before, contracts lasted for several years and
enterprises had to make a large money commitment based on volume.
The Economy Frame Relay service is for large enterprise customers
that use frame relay for simple applications such as e-mail and
linking 100 or more nodes.
Both of the packages also include 24/7 customer support and give
customers as many logical connections between their hosts and sites
as needed. Customers used to pay separately for each connection
used.
Meanwhile yesterday the US Bankruptcy Court approved Cogent
Communications' plans to purchase PSINet's Web hosting and Internet
access assets.
Cogent offers 100Mbps Internet access for $1,000 per month over a
fibre-optic network consisting of a OC-192 core and several OC-48
MANs located across the US.