Competitive Ethernet service provider tw telecom continues to make good on its stated vision of giving customers greater control over their service capabilities.

The company this week announced Dynamic Prioritization, an intelligent network capability allowing business customers to quickly adjust Class of Service of their applications. (See tw telecom Gives Users Class of Service Control.)

The new capability comes a couple of years after tw telecom inc. (Nasdaq: TWTC) launched its Dynamic Capacity offering to enable customers access to bandwidth on demand, a capability the carrier recently extended across its service portfolio. That offering was one of the earliest entries in what has become an increasingly popular bandwidth-on-demand movement driven in part by cloud networking practices. (See tw telecom Delivers On-Demand Ethernet, XO Launches BoD, Multi-Cloud Support, and Cloud Propels Growth in Bandwidth on Demand, Heavy Reading Finds.)

It also falls in line with the industry trend toward application-aware networking, and the long-time vision of the tw telecom team to give customers greater service control, a message that the service provider's senior vice president, Mike Rouleau, reiterated at Light Reading's Ethernet & SDN Expo last fall. (See ESDN: tw telecom Stresses Customer Control .)

Why this matters
Class of Service changes traditionally have involved a much more manual process, in which customers have had to fill out forms to request changes that might not take effect for several weeks. It's an area ripe for improvement via innovation, especially as end-users are demanding (and will often pay for) anything that makes service management easier, quicker and more flexible.

If more carriers are getting into the bandwidth-on-demand game, then it makes sense for tw telecom and others to start pushing the next frontier. It stands to reason that's where some near-term competitive differentiation may lie.

— Dan O'Shea, Managing Editor, Light Reading