Network Design

AboveNet announces ultralow latency guarantees across metro services portfolio

Sept. 28, 2009

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009 -- The program, called the Agility Guarantee, will offer customers ultralow-latency performance across the entire array of metro wave and Ethernet services that AboveNet provides in the top 15 U.S. markets.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009 -- AboveNet Inc., a provider of high-bandwidth connectivity, has announced its low-latency guarantee. The program, called the Agility Guarantee, will offer customers ultralow-latency performance across the entire array of metro wave and Ethernet services that AboveNet provides in the top 15 U.S. markets.

"We are offering this guarantee of ultralow-latency performance to provide our most demanding customers the assurance they need for their critical applications," says AboveNet chief technology officer Rajiv Datta. "They require industry-leading low latency coupled with the highly reliable, high-performance networks that we design and implement for them."

A growing number of latency sensitive applications (such as VoIP and video) impact end users across industries. In addition to providing a high-performance option to these customers, AboveNet's Agility Guarantee is designed to meet the stringent requirements of certain industry segments:

financial services algorithmic trading
energy/oil futures trading
live gaming environments
media and video applications

"AboveNet is naturally positioned to provide ultralow-latency performance due to our fiber-intensive delivery model, and our focus on high bandwidth customers," Datta adds. "By offering these services with direct routing and minimal equipment interfaces, we can offer round-trip latencies as low as sub-1-ms for some of our services, which I believe is unmatched in the industry."

The program uses real-world metrics, instead of averages and one-way trip measurements:

all guarantees are provided as round-trip delay values
guarantees apply for the end-to-end service, not just the PoP-PoP component
guarantees represent maximum values, not an "average" number

AboveNet's metro services portfolio includes Metro Wave services, which provide customers a completely private WDM-based network offering security, scalability, and operational control; and Metro Ethernet services that provide private and nonprivate options, including a range of reserved and guaranteed bandwidth availability choices.

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