British Telecommunications Plc has announced a new pricing structure for its Frame Relay-based ExpressLane local network interconnect service, as well as faster access speeds, enabling users to link local networks at speeds up to 2.048Mbps. It said it was considering upping the speed from 56Kbps or 64Kbps, in April following criticism that the service was slower than the competition. It has also added a Committed Information Rate, which gives users provisioned information rates of up to 1Mbps, as part of the service roll-out. With the additional options, the phone company introduced a new pricing structure based on customer-specified feature sets, which it says reduces domestic prices by up to 50%. In this scheme, all available features are grouped into four categories: Access, Traffic Options, Port Fee and CPE-Gateways. Customers receive a flat-rate monthly bill reflecting their specific configuration. As a guide, British Telecom says that an eight-site, domestic Frame Relay network covering Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle with network access at 56Kbps would cost about $1,204 a month per site, which it says represents a 42% saving on previous pricing. A four-site hubbed network using a Paris-based hub with London, Tokyo and New York remote locations and 64Kbps access costs $16,400 a month. British Telecom also says it will support switched virtual circuits – which allow for dynamic routing of data – only on de facto industry standard systems. While it claims it has developed software to support virtual circuits on its proprietary systems, it says its strategy is now to move away from proprietary hardware and to evolve onto standards-based systems – efforts will now be concentrated on working with bridge-router manufacturers and switch vendors to support this capability. It says it is currently testing StrataCom Inc’s ForeSight congestion management software, which runs on the IPX system, and plans to incorporate it into ExpressLane this quarter.
