Viatel is incorporated in Bermuda but has its operational HQ in Egham, UK. It combines its retail comms activity with a wholesale connectivity offering in six countries in Western Europe (UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland), a service offering wavelengths as well as Ethernet connectivity to other telcos and large corporate customers.
Mike Davies, head of product management for the carrier, said there are now around 100 resellers for its retail offerings. These comprise MPLS, broadband (DSL) and VoIP, but the last two of these are more prevalent on the indirect side, he went on.
Broadband is particularly strong there, because it’s quite costly to buy DSL directly from BT Wholesale, he explained. They offer 2Mbps, 30Mbps, 155Mbps or 622Mbps connections, whereas if a carrier, ISP or SI comes to us, we buy it from BT in a big pipe and can deliver smaller chunks, so they can take 10Mbps and scale as needed to 20Mbps, for instance.
In addition, we can offer them automated services such as ordering, provisioning and diagnostics through a portal, so lots of our resellers take our connectivity then layer managed services such as MPLS VPN on top. There are also two flavours to that offering, in that the reseller can take a fully managed service with a CPE router from Viatel or, if they have the nous, can take a wire-only service an put in the managed VPN themselves.
