Wholesale Managed Data Services Revenue Forecast in Western Europe to 2016

Countries covered: Europe

This report is one of many Databook covering key aspects of the Wholesale Managed Data Services Revenue Forecast:

• Frame-relay service - Frame relay enables private virtual circuits to be set up between sites. Bandwidth is not permanently allocated. Access speeds of up to 45Mbps are typical, with committed information rates across the service of up to 25Mbps. Frame relay is well suited to the bursty nature of local area network (LAN)-to-LAN traffic.
• ATM service - An ATM service enables permanent and switched virtual circuits. Access speeds from 2Mbps to 155Mbps are typical. ATM can be used to integrate voice, data and video application datastreams requiring different bit rates over broadband wide-area transmission circuits. ATM also allows the different datastreams to be prioritized by type (class of service) and transmitted at very high speeds. It is well suited to high bandwidth applications including realtime applications and LAN-to-LAN multimedia.
• IP VPN - An IP VPN is a VPN in which the shared public network is an IP network, which may or may not be part of the internet. An IP VPN service is an IP VPN in which the device or application used to restrict membership (called the VPN gateway) is provided as part of the service. The VPN gateway can be within the service provider's network or can be located at the customer premises, but is owned and managed by the service provider; these are layer-3 IP VPNs.

For the purposes of these forecasts, Ovum takes a broad view of the definition of MPLS-based services and includes implementations that meet the Internet Engineering Task Force MPLS standard (RFC 2547), closely related proprietary implementations and extensions, as well as future derivations that share the key characteristics of MPLS. In effect, any tunneling technique that labels tunnels so that they can be acted on directly by routers would fall within this definition.

The IPsec category includes all VPN implementations that fall outside the broad MPLS definition. Today, most non-MPLS site-to-site IP VPN services use IPsec tunneling as the primary mechanism for traffic segregation. (Many also use IPsec encryption, but the use or non-use of encryption is immaterial to Ovum's definition.)