National Ethernet

Long distance connectivity at an attractive price

Want to hook up offices miles away from each other as easily as if they were next door? Then our National Ethernet solution will bring it all together by enabling all your LANs across the UK to operate as a single Ethernet domain, without the need for complex routing protocols or routing equipment. And it’s all flexible and totally secure. It’s also a low-cost, high bandwidth alternative to Leased Lines and ATM & Frame Relay services: offering a truly unbeatable Class of Service and reporting options with flexible bandwidth increments.

National Ethernet Snapshot

Take a look at our quick guide to National Ethernet.

Key features

• Flexible bandwidths - access bandwidths of 10Mb, 100Mb, 1Gb and logical bandwidths from between 2Mb up to 1Gb*.
• Layer 2 Ethernet site to site connectivity - gives you the flexibility to control your own routing and have a much greater degree of control over your network resources than with a typical Layer 3 IPVPN solution.
• Scalability - bandwidths can be upgraded to grow with your needs. Most bandwidth upgrades can be conducted remotely without the need for a site visit.

* Geographical service variations may apply in some cases - contact us for more details.

What does all that mean for your day-to-day business?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had the kind of Ethernet speed and simplicity you have on your site LAN working right across the country? Think of what it could do for you: encourage collaboration across sites with cool converged applications, slash travel costs and wasted time, boosting productivity. So whether you need a national point to point or point to multipoint service, National Ethernet networks bring LAN performance to your Wide Area Network (WAN).

Why National Ethernet?

If you need a low cost alternative to traditional Leased Lines or ATM / Frame Relay services, then National Ethernet networks could be ideal for you. That’s if you require::

• High quality, high bandwidth connectivity 
• Long distance connectivity between two or more sites 
• A cost effective replacement for ATM or leased lines 
• The transfer of mission critical data 
• Reliable voice, data and video applications between sites 
• The deployment of distributed applications
• Secure, centralised storage of data
• The establishment of robust disaster recovery solutions.

Our network has one of the largest Ethernet presences in the UK and it can carry a variety of services and high bandwidth applications, such as multimedia packages, as well as voice and data traffic. Flexible Class of Service (CoS) options and web enabled performance reporting options gives you the control and visibility you need.

Flexibility and performance in one package

Ethernet networking is much easier and more flexible to roll out and manage than a complex WAN infrastructure, enabling you to deploy multiple applications such as IP CCTV, Voice or Video over IP. And, it also facilitates disaster recovery provision (a relaxing thought). The increased network performance delivered by National Ethernet makes it ideal for organisations needing to run bandwidth-hungry or real-time applications between sites, as well as supporting CoS mechanisms which enable the right traffic to get the right Quality of Service (QoS). Our service comes with a flexible choice of bandwidths from 2Mb to 1Gb and can be easily modified to meet your changing needs.

Cost effective and easy to manage solutions

As well as creating seamless corporate connectivity, consolidated networks are inherently more cost effective and more easily managed. Using Virtual LAN (VLAN) technology, traffic can be segmented securely and configured remotely so that most upgrades won’t require a site visit or hardware upgrade - and won't cause unnecessary disruption to your business either. Because that’s the last thing anybody wants.

Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180

Features & benefits

See what you get

Features

• Flexible bandwidths - access bandwidths of 10Mb, 100Mb, 1Gb and logical bandwidths from between 2Mb up to 1Gb. 
• Layer 2 Ethernet site to site connectivity - gives you the flexibility to control your own routing and have greater control over your network resources than with a typical Layer 3 IPVPN solution.
• Scalability - bandwidths can be upgraded to grow with customer’s needs. Most bandwidth upgrades can be done remotely without the need for a site visit.
• Flexibility - both point to point and point to multipoint topologies supported.
• Resilience - storage can be handled on separate streams from corporate traffic to ensure integrity of data storage and backup.
• Quality of Service - varying Class of Service options to support the Quality of Service needed for today’s complex data environments.
• Reporting - providing web based reporting giving detailed traffic reporting per Class of Service and for network performance measures, T 5.1; SV1; GTB6.4; .NET CLR 2.0.

Benefits

• Extended reach - extend your organisation's communications over greater distances nationwide and at higher bandwidths than traditional SDH-based point to point circuits will allow.
• Resource sharing - share network resources between multiple departments or buildings by the creation of multiple virtual local area networks (VLANs).
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) - National Ethernet network is supported by a comprehensive SLA, offering service credits if we fail to deliver an excellent service.
• Performance - our latency, jitter and packet loss performance figures ensure real support for your business-critical applications. 
• Scalability - the service can be quickly and easily configured and upgraded, so that it grows to meet your needs.

Give your business the connectivity it deserves.

Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180

Detailed Info

National Ethernet

Long distance connectivity at an attractive price

Bringing it all closer

National Ethernet is part of our range of switched optical services. The availability of a national solution enables you to adopt a more unified network topology allowing LAN to LAN traffic, business-critical data, video and voice to be quickly and easily accessible. It offers the ability to consolidate and reduce the cost of bandwidth provision, reducing your total cost of ownership.

• Security - All your ports are physically separate from other organisations. Your traffic is separated at Layer 2 and as you own and manage all Layer 3 devices, the service will not be compromised by potentially insecure traffic such as traffic originating over the internet.
• Consolidation - by removing the bottlenecks in the WAN, Ethernet allows consolidation of server resources into centralised locations; and the increase in capacity can be used to deliver new or enhanced services.
• Flexible bandwidths - the bandwidths available are more flexible than those traditionally supported by WANs, leased lines or private circuits (2Mb, 34Mb) and traditional Ethernet deployments (10Mb, 100Mb and 1Gb). These are remotely configured and in most cases can also be remotely upgraded. Bespoke bandwidths within these ranges are also possible.
• Reduced downtime - in most cases no physical changes are required in order to upgrade bandwidths or add an additional VLAN between sites, therefore downtime during upgrades is largely eliminated, providing a more cost effective solution compared with traditional PDH/SDH-based circuits.

Reporting

We’ll work with you to define the reporting that you require and have developed customer-friendly templates to support this reporting on IPVPN and National Ethernet. Service and network performance is available through a dedicated web portal provided by Infovista, enabling us to monitor your network performance and to verify it against your service level agreement. This data is then presented in near real time in the form of graphs, charts and tables through InfoVista's portal; you can use the portal to drill down on individually tailored metrics on service and access utilisation, packet loss, jitter and latency (shown as round trip delay for National Ethernet) break down, as well as viewing individual reports on traffic utilisation for each separate class of service available with our products. To support your needs for forward planning, we also retain historic data, giving the ability to trend performance over months and years. Like we say, we’re with you all the way.

Lead times

National Ethernet is implemented with a target lead time of 30 working days, subject to feasibility and site survey.

Service Level Agreement

• Guaranteed Ready For Service dates. 
• 24/7 network monitoring with a six-hour Fault Restoration guarantee.
• Annual availability guarantee backed by Service Credits for failure to meet these targets.

Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180

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