London-based Exponential-e marketing director Harvey Jones said the company offers virtual private LAN services, or VPLS, powered by Alcatel technology on an MPLS core covering the capital and 70 other cities around the UK. He said it also has a point of presence on Hudson Street in New York for extending WAN services to the US, and in January announced relationship with San Francisco, California-based Ethernet services provider Yipes Enterprise Services Inc.

They hand off their customers’ traffic to us and vice-versa, though not on an exclusive basis, said Jones. Exponential-e followed up that deal with a similar relationship with German Ethernet WAN provider, Munich-based TeraGate AG, whose customer base is more high-end (it includes Deutsche Bank and Reuters) and describes itself primarily as a Gigabit Ethernet provider.

Jones said other relationships are in the pipeline. The idea is to form a network that can compete with global WAN providers like BTGS, Orange Business Services (formerly Equant), AT&T, and Verizon. He said that against such competition, Exponential-e’s advantage is its agility, since with no legacy A or Frame Relay infrastructure with which to concern itself, deploying a next-generation network was a considerably faster and easier process, and it launched its NGN in June.

While it does not have the legacy infrastructure to deal with, Exponential-e nonetheless saw the need to deliver traditional serial services such as T1/E1, and has deployed Pseudo-Wire technology from Axerra Networks Inc. Pseudo-Wire technology, of which Boston, Massachusetts-based Axerra is the most high-profile provider, is circuit and service emulation over packet access networks, which Exponential-e says enables carriers to convert any packet access network (Carrier Ethernet, broadband wireless including WiMAX, cable HFC, xDSL, PON) into a full-service alternative to TDM access.

We have customers who want to enable executives to work from home, but without the vagaries of DSL and its contention ratios, said Jones. With the Axerra technology we can offer them 2Mbps uncontended service, presented as Ethernet.

The Axerra kit is also used to underpin some of Exponential-e’s voice offerings, according to Mukesh Bavisi, the carrier’s engineering director. We can deploy it to connect two legacy PBXs on different sites as a tie line, enabling local calling, or we can use E1 emulation to a PSTN provider in one of our co-location sites, he said.