ntl:Telewest Business extends its class of service to a new level

Our converged solutions have now been enhanced to provide eight Classes of Services across the IPVPN portfolio. This develpoment now means we offer a greater Class of Service choice than any other UK communications provider*.

The new Class of Service offering is available immediately on all dedicated ntl:Telewest Business IPVPN services, which range in speed from 64 Kilobits-per-second (kbps) to 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps). Demand for greater granularity of traffic prioritisation is primarily being driven by large corporate and public sector organisations. Many of these organisations use ntl:Telewest Business’ own Ethernet circuits to access the IPVPN service, and these access options have been available nationwide since November 2006.

Having eight Classes of Service enables organisations to ring-fence their most critical network traffic, such as the data created by different types of core business management systems, from other less crucial traffic.

“We've turned up the heat in the UK business communications sector by taking Class of Service to a new level,” said MD Stephen Beynon. “Communications are the lifeblood of the modern organisation and customers increasingly want highly specific prioritisation of their network traffic.

“With eight Classes of Service we enable them to assign higher priorities to the likes of video and core business management applications than email and web browsing traffic. This puts customers in much greater control of how their information is carried over networks, depending on its importance,” said Mr Beynon. 

The eight Classes of Service are:

• Real Time 1: Voice media (real time). These are typically variable rate ‘inelastic’ applications that require low jitter and loss, plus very low delay. Normally these are Voice over IP (VoIP) and sensitive video applications that do not have the ability to change encoding rates, or to mark packets with different importance indications.
• Real Time 2: Video media (real time). This is recommended for delay-sensitive and jitter-sensitive video applications such as IPCCTV.
• Customer Control: This is best suited for peer-to-peer and client-server signalling and control functions, using protocols such as SIP, SIP-T, H.323, H.248 and Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP).
• Application 1: Multimedia video conferencing, which are not purely real-time in nature, or business-critical applications.
• Application 2, 3 and 4: Business-critical applications. These three classes are best suited for applications that require bandwidth and loss guarantees but have a reasonable level of tolerance for jitter and latency. The application classes are equivalent to each other in terms of priority; however each can be guaranteed bandwidth independently of one other.
• Standard: The Standard service class is for applications that have not been identified as requiring differentiated treatment and is often referred to as best effort. 

* Based on Market intelligence available from Current Analysis