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ATLANTA—BellSouth Corp. is planning to lift an ever-increasing burden of networking duties off the enterprise shoulder as it continues to upgrade its regional MPLS network.
By the third quarter of this year, the company will add ATM and Metro Ethernet access to the regional data network, which it unveiled earlier this year. The addition of the higher-speed access technologies will make BellSouths managed network services available to larger enterprises, such as state governments and large banks, company officials said.
Within six months, the network will be able to carry voice-over-IP traffic, which the company hopes will attract the remote offices of large regional enterprises as well as medium-sized businesses currently using VoIP on site.
“A lot of cutting edge stuff that is happening right now is happening in medium businesses out of necessity,” said Mark Kaish, vice president of data marketing and product management at BellSouth in Atlanta.
The evolution toward managing an increasing number of enterprise data services is based on BellSouths projection that businesses will prefer to pass their complex network-centric service tasks to outsiders.
“You choose what it is you want us to do for you. Well do all the hard stuff,” Kaish said. “The world was really simple a couple years ago and now its gotten really complicated, and in a few years it will become simple again.”
BellSouths regional network services work best for enterprises with at least 60 percent of their sites in the BellSouth territory, Kaish said. The carrier can connect site outside its region to the network, but it is more expensive.
Further down the road, BellSouth plans to roll out a regional storage service in partnership with IBM, Kaish said.