Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) announced a new offering for businesses and government users that allows them to prioritize different enterprise and Internet of Things applications. Verizon said it is the first U.S. carrier to provide this kind of quality-of-service differentiation.
Verizon said the solution, called Private Network Traffic Management, will be a subscription-based offering available only to Verizon Private Network customers. The new traffic management solution can be added to select Verizon Private Network LTE devices for a monthly fee per user, based on the service level option selected, the price of which Verizon did not identify.
The service levels feature a "mission critical" traffic management class, which Verizon said is ideal for applications such as video and Voice-over-IP. A customer could decide to prioritize video communications or VoIP over emails or lower-priority M2M traffic.
The services include:
- Premium & Enhanced: This will be available to all Verizon Private Network customers and allows customers to allocate portions of their LTE connection, in correlation with the selected subscription, for sending mission critical applications.
- Public Safety: This will be a higher-tier service offering exclusively available to public safety customers, including emergency services or other first responders, who will receive the highest transmission priority to enable critical communications to reach their destination quickly.
Verizon said that the private network offering serves as a building block for IoT applications and "mobile first" applications. The service will work over Verizon's wireless network as well as its global private IP wireline network, and will also integrate with cloud service providers via Verizon Secure Cloud Interconnect. Verizon said that the private network will provide a secure end-to-end environment for managing application performance and sophisticated enterprise-grade systems.
Data traveling over the private network won't need virtual private network (VPN) protocols, Carlos Benavides, associate director of product management at Verizon, told Computerworld.
Benavides said he thinks private network will primarily be used to support Internet of Things buildouts. Since a lot of IoT applications do not require a great deal of processing power, not needing a VPN with the private network could be an advantage, he said.
"Private network management is most needed in congested situations," Benavides told Computerworld. "Customers will have a portion of LTE available for mission critical apps and the rest of their apps can be sent over the available LTE speed."
"The value proposition of Verizon's latest offering for organizations is quite dramatic," Current Analysis analyst Kathryn Weldon said. "Since the advent of 4G LTE wireless networks, we haven't seen anything like this which allows customers to prioritize their business critical applications over classes of service from their mobile devices. In addition, the seamless integration of Verizon's private wireless network with the company's global IP private wireline network extends the enterprise to a wireless environment, offering significant benefits for leveraging the Internet of Things and other mobility initiatives."
For more:
- see this Verizon release
- see this Computerworld article
- see this Light Reading article
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