Verizon Business builds its own Australian network

Stuart Corner
Friday, 09 November 2007 06:22

Business IT - Networking

Verizon Business is investing heavily in Australia to build an inter-capital optic fibre network using is own transmission equipment and high capacity links leased from Telstra and Nextgen Networks. The move follows the expansion earlier of its IP MPLS network with nodes in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Canberra being added to the existing two in Sydney and Melbourne. The new transmission network, contracts for which were signed this week, will be used to interconnect these nodes.

Ihab Tarazi, Verizon Business's VP of global network planning, told iTWire that "we today lease capacity as STM-1s and STM-4s from carriers and we are moving to a major transport backbone where we own the transmission equipment and buy wavelengths and high capacity links, many a 10gbps and more and integrate them ourselves."

He added: "These and our other investments in Australia mean that Australia will probably be one of the largest investment areas for us, this year and next."

Installation of the new capital city MPLS nodes is now complete and the new transmission network will be full operational by early 2008. Tarazi said it would give the company good national coverage of the locations of its multinational customers. "It means we can manage the network end to end and provide our services all the way to the hend customer in all these locations."

A third investment is an upgrade to Verizon Business' public IP network which is used by ISPs and by enterprises for IP VPN networks. "We are upgrading our public IP network in Sydney and Melbourne to the latest technology," Tarazi said. "This is part of our global network and is the most interconnected public IP network in the word."

The fourth area of investment will cater for the increased international traffic load that the first three investments will generate. "We are expanding our capacity on the Southern Cross cable by Q1 2008," Tarazi said. "Globally we see continued growth from all our key customers in terms of bandwidth into and out of Australia."

Tarazi added: "We don't have access to any data to prove the claims but we are probably the largest of the global carriers in terms of presence here in Australia." Verizon Business does not put dollar values on any of its investments, even high level numbers, nor does it disclose regional revenues.

Its large presence in Australia is partly the result of history. MCI, since acquired by Verizon Business, bought what was then Australia's largest ISP, OzEmail. It sold the customer base and access operations to iiNet in 2005, but retained OzEmail's backbone network.

In addition to its new investments, it operates extensive metropolitan area fibre networks to link its global customers and has its own fibre links to the landing stations of Australia's international submarine cable systems.