London, UK-based Vanco’s business model is to offer managed WAN services to the corporate market without owning any network infrastructure. Instead, it negotiates capacity and services from asset-based carriers on the customer’s behalf and manages the relationship. In the last year it has also begun signing reseller deals, the main example of which to date has been with Swisscom Solutions Ltd.

In stitching together MPLS capacity from different network providers for its customers, said Ciaran Roche, a lead technical consultant at Vanco, the company has to date offered them its MPLS Matrix service for their core connectivity with its IP Secure service. That service is an IP VPN service running over a variety of last miles: DSL, Ethernet and even 3G wireless (specifically, it is running over EV-DO for some sites in the US).

However, MPLS comes with a lot of overhead in terms of paying for the Layer-3 port, with the bandwidth often being charges on a per-Megabit basis, said Roche, whereas if they take a Layer-2 service [i.e. Ethernet connectivity delivered via VPLS], it’s more cost-effective because they can plus it straight into an Ethernet switch on site.

To this end, over the last six months Vanco has begun buying VPLS services from carrriers and presenting them to customers as cheaper alternatives, and ones free of the bandwidth constraints of MPLS, he said.

The company calls this service Ethernet Engaged, and gets most of its wide-area Ethernet (i.e. VPLS) from in-country asset-based carriers, often incumbents, who can’t address the international WAN requirements of corporate customers, but have the fiber density to deliver VPLS throughout their particular territories. It usually replaces either a point-to-point leased line of an MPLS tail onto a global network, Roche said.

The type of requirement Ethernet Engaged is designed to meet is also quite clearly delineated, he said.

It’s either a gateway onto an MPLS network, with VPLS giving the in-country density, or a service that sits alongside MPLS to reduce the number of locations requiring a gateway, he explained. In other words, instead of 15 MPLS links to the core in France, a company can consolidate them into two main sites using Ethernet, then have just two big MPLS links onto the core.