Verizon this month plans to announce enhancements to its switched Ethernet service designed to make it more reliable for enterprise applications. Verizon is expected to add class-of-service features to its switched Ethernet LAN (E-LAN) and Ethernet virtual private line (E-VPL) services, which are used predominantly for enterprise branch office site-to-site communication. Verizon plans to offer three levels of class of service, all backed by stringent service-level agreements (SLA), for E-LAN and E-VPL. They are:

•  Standard, a best-effort service for e-mail and Internet surfing;

•  Priority, which offers throughput guarantees akin to frame relay committed information rate, for customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications;

•  Real time, for voice and video.

For each class, Verizon is offering SLAs on data delivery, latency and jitter. Should Verizon not meet its SLA guarantees, preliminary information provided by the carrier states that it will offer users a 20% credit on the monthly recurring cost of the service. (Read the story)

AT&T is expanding its security services with e-mail protection, new personal firewall support and consulting services. The carrier is now offering users anti-spam and anti-virus protection with its Secure E-mail Gateway Service. AT&T is teaming with FrontBridge Technologies to support the service in the carrier’s Internet data centers across the U.S. The service includes spam filtering, virus blocking, content management and policy enforcement for inbound and outbound messages. (Read the story)

Reform for reform's sake. Four congressional staffers said Congress should pass some kind of telecommunications reform by late 2006, but they couldn't agree on what kind of reform is needed. The four, part of a panel discussion on telecom reform at a Broadband Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., discussed a range of options for telecom reform, including exempting voice over IP from most traditional telecom regulations, creating a new regulatory category for advanced Internet communications and reforming how telecom carriers pay each other for network interconnection. (Read the story)