BellSouth this week officially introduced its Virtual Ethernet Service (VES), a metropolitan area offering that supports four classes of service for point-to-point and multipoint applications.

The service can designate traffic into four different classes with different routing priorities: best effort, business critical, interactive and real-time. Real-time and interactive classes are designed for applications that have a low tolerance for delays, such as voice and video.

Business critical and best effort are used to distinguish higher priority business data from non-critical applications such as e-mail and general Web surfing.

Businesses can combine more than one class of service on the same Ethernet port, creating additional virtual ports and allocating the appropriate bandwidth to each application, BellSouth says. These virtual ports can be adjusted through a Web interface based on the bandwidth required and the applications in use.

The service offers committed information rates (CIR) to ensure guaranteed bandwidth throughput, BellSouth says. CIRs are available at 2Mbps, 4Mbps, 8Mbps, 10Mbps, 20Mbps, 50Mbps, 80Mbps, 100Mbps, 200Mbps, 300Mbps, 450Mbps, 600Mbps, 750Mbps and 900Mbps.

BellSouth offers service level agreements according to the class of service designation. Those SLAs are:

* Network availability -- 99.5% to 99.995%.

* Jitter -- 1 millisecond.

* Latency -- 5 to 15 milliseconds.

* Packet delivery -- 99.9% to 99.995%.

* Time to repair -- 4 hours.

SLAs are supported by Web-accessible customer network management software and credits are awarded if service levels drop below contractual levels, BellSouth says.

BellSouth recently launched Mid-band Ethernet speeds options of 2Mbps, 4Mbps and 8Mbps over both copper and fiber, and expanded Metro Ethernet access to Network VPN throughout the Southeast. VES is also available in Mid-band Ethernet speeds and in Metro Ethernet access to Network VPN applications.

VES is available in over 200 cities and towns across BellSouth's nine-state region in the Southeast. Pricing is based on specific customer requirements for bandwidth, class of service and other factors.