IP solutions provider Global Crossing (News - Alert) today announced it will offer six Classes of Service (CoS) for its Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN) service.

The offering of six Classes of Service, up from three classes, is expected to give Global Crossing customers flexibility to prioritize time-sensitive applications, such as voice and video, differently from each other, while still maintaining overall priority over data applications such as e-mail.

The  current IP VPN customers will be upgraded from Basic, Enhanced and Premium service to Basic Plus, Enhanced Plus or Premium Plus service respectively, with no price increase.

"Global Crossing is dedicated to an excellent customer experience and continues to meet customer requirements with innovative solutions that provide meaningful capabilities," said Gary Breauninger, chief marketing officer. "Having six classes of service gives our enterprise customers a greater ability to ensure uninterrupted transmission of their most time-sensitive and important data, allowing them to control IP VPN performance as they increasingly rely on a single IP-based platform for real-time and converged applications."

The growing number of applications using IP requires more classes of service to enable businesses to better prioritize one application's data transmissions over another; if the network is congested, applications that can tolerate delay -- such as e-mail -- will wait to be sent until more time- sensitive traffic -- such as voice -- gets through, according to Breauninger.

By stratifying data traffic priority into six Classes of Service, Global Crossing is enabling customers to prioritize all voice over all video, for example, while having both remain in the premium time-sensitive class of service. This also meets the needs of many customers that desire a low priority class of service for Internet traffic and other non-business critical applications that don't require real-time performance.

"As multinational enterprises consolidate many applications on IP, they end up mixing delay-sensitive traffic, important transaction data and general traffic," said Brian Washburn, an analyst with Current Analysis (News - Alert). "Having more classes of service gives these companies greater control to meet the delivery requirements of mission critical applications. Global Crossing now offers enterprise customers this flexibility, which ensures support for their customer's current and future application needs.”

Global Crossing IP VPN Service connects an enterprise's worldwide locations into a single, protected corporate network with true global reach, scalable connectivity, greater security, multiple access options, a broad range of IP communication services, and guaranteed quality of service (QoS). The standard IP VPN offer with Network Integrity allows enterprises to monitor key performance metrics -- in real-time -- across their networks via Global Crossing's uCommand portal. Monthly site-to-site performance reports by the customer's Classes of Service (CoS) are provided as assurance that Global Crossing stands behind, and is compliant with, its performance guarantees. In addition, the standard IP VPN offer alerts users when network performance is affected, providing an immediate proactive notification for their network.

Tim Gray is a Web Editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To see more of his articles, please visit Tim Gray’s columnist page.

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