International Orange Outlook

More on innovative Japanese communications services, Softbank’s subsidiary, Japan Telecom, has a Grid Computing service for medium to large enterprises. Instead of adding servers, storage and database licenses, a customer can add computing capacity on the Japan Telecom network. The carrier sells as its smallest package a 1 CPU service (running of a blade server), with Oracle 10G database and 10 Gigabytes of storage at a price of $2,000 per month. Access to the Computing Grid is ideally through a 10 Mbps Carrier Ethernet service. Japan Telecom delivers these services to support customer needs in the automotive, healthcare, financial services and publishing industries

The motivation to supplement general data bandwidth and internet access services comes from competitive pressures. With 100 Mbps Carrier Ethernet service now available at $300/month, a carrier would need to move up closer to the application layer to reap financial rewards. The availability of software solutions that can partition database processes to demarcate customers allows such a service to become possible. Customers can sign on or turn computing services on a per CPU basis. I am eager to see such services thrive in the US market. This is not general storage, this involves a slice of the data center with processing capacity and database functionality in addition to storage to be available like a switch.

Posted by Mikko Disini at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As a class of service, Carrier Ethernet is enjoying robust growth in the US market. Designed to augment or replace existing private line (PL) or ATM services, Carrier Ethernet from ring-based Ethernet-over-SONET to point-to-point Ethernet-over-Fiber services allow financial service firms, hospitals, higher educational institutions, the public sector and manufacturers to expand their communications capabilities to support business needs.

Where the US is relatively new to adopting Carrier Ethernet, enterprise customers in Japan appear to be savvy users, to the point where competition has created very attractive price points. A leading Japanese carrier pointed out to me that their customer base is satisfied to use Layer 3 based Ethernet services provided service level agreements in the backbone are available. The upshot, a 100 Mbps service within the general metropolitan area of Tokyo have dropped to roughly $300/month for a 100 Mbps service per end or $600/month per connection - $6/Mbps/month. Putting this in context, in the US market, a DS3 service is $2000/month for a connection - $44/Mbps/month. Even the lowest priced Ethernet service on a per Mbps basis costs $6/Mbps/month for a 1 Gbps wavelength service within a city area.

Posted by Mikko Disini at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)