The vision of newly independent Tinet is to differentiate its services based on the highest possible service levels, international reach, and competitive price points. It is investing heavily in select, specialist products for the wholesale marketplace, writes Paolo Gambini. Co-sponsored feature: Tinet

Paolo Gambini: Tinet’s ethernet solution offers
dedicated-capacity leased lines and any-to-any
connectivity of IP VPN

Every node in Tinet’s network is identical from a service and support
perspective, from Miami and Montreal to Singapore, Bucharest and London

Tinet, formerly the international IP wholesale carrier arm of Tiscali Group, continues to grow and now, with the backing of its new financial investor, its international growth ambitions know no bounds. In particular, Tinet’s end-to-end, last-mile ethernet extension service is attracting high levels of interest among local B2B service providers.

With the explosion in the requirement for network-centric applications, the corporate market requires greater broadband performance and reliability than ever before. This includes the ability to connect globally, with quality service levels that support consistent high-speed network connectivity.

That’s why Tinet, the former carrier arm of Tiscali Group, continues to invest heavily in taking reliable, highly-available IP and Ethernet high-capacity services right into business customers’ premises, via partnerships with local metro Ethernet service providers and systems integrators, globally.

There are three basic needs in the wholesale IP market today. These are support for high and rapidly growing volumes of traffic (scalability); high availability (reliability); and global reach (location, location, location).

Today, the global reach of network services is particularly important. Over the last few years, the market has seen significant changes on an international scale. Whereas initially the internet was largely driven by user traffic demands in the US and then western Europe, its influence now touches most corners of the globe, from Eastern Europe and the Middle East to the Asia Pacific region, and from Africa to Latin America, and beyond.

China outpaces the US

There are now more broadband users in China than in the US. And, while five years ago Turkey had just 5,000 broadband users, it has 6 million today. Morocco, too, has grown from a few thousand users to over 2 million, while countries like Brazil and Malaysia are also gradually catching up.

The commitment of national governments to local broadband connectivity is clearly playing a part. It is not only the numbers of users that have grown which is significant, but the intensity of broadband use, too — as increasing percentages of applications are delivered as centralised, online services.

As the world continues to become smaller, and businesses strive to maximise their penetration of international markets, consistent global connectivity becomes a vital facet to their success — particularly as many organisations seek to consolidate and standardise their IT services and data centres, for reasons of cost-efficiency, scalability, flexibility and resiliency.

Single-minded

Since 2002, Tinet, as the independent company is now known, has focused exclusively on wholesale IP and global ethernet delivery services, as a pure-play IP/MPLS wholesale carrier. Having put all its eggs in one basket, the company’s vision and motivation has always been to differentiate its services based on the highest possible service levels, international reach, and competitive price points.

Deliberately, the company offers only four products to the wholesale marketplace: IP transit; last-mile ethernet extension; remote peering services; and ethernet private lines. This means all of Tinet’s focus and investment is in ensuring that these offerings are the best that they can be.

Having avoided introducing a retail arm to its business, Tinet’s entire go-to-market strategy relies upon close partnerships with local and regional service providers and systems integrators serving the business sector.

When, in May this year, Tinet’s sale to BS Private Equity was finalised, this marked a very positive move for the company. Now its majority shareholder, the oldest private equity firm in Italy is fully committed to the company’s success, and will provide sufficient financial investment to enable Tinet to continue to grow its global presence and provide quality services to international customers.

Fast, profitable growth

From a standing start in 2002, Tinet is already one of the top 10 global IP backbone providers by size, with over 500 wholesale customers today. According to market analysts such as Renesys, Tinet is growing faster than the majority of its competitors and – significantly – its revenue is growing profitably, thanks to its unequivocal market focus.

Today, Tinet has network presence in three continents — Europe, North America and Asia — from which it serves customers across five continents, including Africa and Latin America.

By March 2010, Tinet will have a third network operations centre, in New Jersey, complementing the existing NOCs in Italy and Germany. The American facility will service North and Latin America, taking network management and customer acquisition operations closer to its local customers, while enabling European workloads to be distributed across staggered time zones.

Closing the loop: last-mile ethernet

Tinet has also been investing heavily in its ethernet extension last-mile high-capacity service. Tinet’s ethernet extension is a Layer 2 ethernet transport service between a point of presence and its customers’ premises.

This wholesale service is designed to supply end-to-end ethernet connectivity into international destinations, such as regional service providers that require global networking solutions and provide delivery of international VPN services to their corporate end-users.

This service is achieved by leveraging Tinet’s vast network footprint and through a number of ethernet network to network interconnection agreements that Tinet continues to develop with various access providers worldwide.

Tinet’s ethernet extension service is ideal for regional service providers competing for global VPN business, which face the challenge of procuring international connectivity fast enough, and cost-effectively. Crucially for the end customer, Tinet then takes end-to-end responsibility for the service, with a back-to-back service-level agreement.

Ethernet extension takes off

Tinet spent the whole of 2008 putting in place this service offering and has so far secured more than a dozen interconnect agreements internationally, to buy and sell last-mile ethernet connectivity. The company has already signed up customers in the US and Europe, and is terminating services for others in the Asia Pacific region.

Although the service is still in the early stages, Tinet has seen a significant growth and interest this year. This is because the ethernet solution, which also supports virtual private LAN service, offers customers the combined advantages of dedicated-capacity leased lines and the any-to-any connectivity of IP VPN solutions, with the additional benefit to reconfigure and scale up point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connections quickly and dynamically in a more cost-effective way than traditional technologies.

While international services will always rely on local third parties to provide the last-mile connectivity, Tinet’s end-to-end service level guarantee, and single interface, adds significant value, ensuring the performance and continuity of critical business applications including VoIP, data synchronisation for disaster recovery, and real-time financial transactions.

International IP transit: the foundation of any global business

IP transit is now a basic building block in any internet-based service solution, yet the weight on its shoulders is substantial. The internet has become an unprecedented platform for applications and services, particularly as more and more solutions are moved out into the cloud, or where IT systems are being managed centrally or virtually.

The result is that more or less everything vital to a company is now being run over IP, demanding consistent speed, quality, availability, latency and overall stability.

Tinet’s service in this context, while highly sophisticated in what it is able to deliver, is very simple. Delivering high performance international connectivity is an extremely challenging task in its own right, which is why Tinet has always pursued extreme specialisation on IP and ethernet connectivity as a way to reduce complexity and deliver consistent performance.

Simplicity, flexibility

It is Tinet’s simplicity and focus which defines the company. This goes right down through the layers of its organisation.

“Our network is based 100% on best-of-breed Juniper devices, for example,” notes Maurizio Binello, Tinet’s chief technology officer. “This means every node is identical from a service and support perspective — from Miami and Montreal to Singapore, Bucharest and London. This ensures that our infrastructure is straightforward to manage and maintain, and therefore that our service is both very high quality but also very cost-effective to run.

“What’s more, our simplicity and relatively small size as an international carrier means we are thoroughly customer-centric, and can shortcut standard processes if we need to, to ensure our customers get what they need,” he adds. By contrast, much larger carriers with thousands of staff and multiple operations tend to be more process-orientated, which can cause frustration for customers when flexibility is required.

The global imperative

While global economic headaches continue to cause pain to the international business community, demand for efficient, reliable, high-capacity IP and ethernet services can only grow, as organisations reassess the way they operate and look for additional flexibility and cost-efficiency in their approach to IT and applications management and enhanced remote collaboration.

Being globally dynamic is also vital to business competitiveness, now that the world at large has become the playing field.

To address this effectively, organisations need access to carriers and service providers with a robust international capability, who can deliver quality and performance on a truly global level.

This is Tinet’s raison d’être.

Paolo Gambini is Tinet’s chief marketing officer