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I am not a marketing major, nor do I pretend to know the first thing about marketing, but I was wondering if all the marketing departments from the Telecommunication providers all hang out at the same bar.  It seems they all talk to each other to make sure none of them have the same name for the same service.  For example, Ethernet Private Line…. Verizon has many different terms which essentially are the same… EPL Metro, EPL National, EPL Access… TWTelecom has ELAN, ELINE, WSNLAN, SNLAN…Qwest has QMOE…AT&T has Gigaman and Opteman….

I know the Carriers will say these all do different things, but really they are all Private Lines connecting to end points, whether it is to the Internet, cross county, or in the metro.  Why can’t marketing departments make it less confusing?  In fact, sometimes the people working for these companies do not even know the product lines themselves.  Intelletrace has been buying Ethernet services for years now, and Verizon has now said it will not honor the pricing they have given us in the past, because the product name is not in the agreement, even though every other Ethernet Acronym is.  I am sure Verizon will do the right thing, as they have been using these contracts for several years, but it is a lot of time wasted to try and understand what exactly are the services which we signed up for.  We constantly have to double check and triple check with all of our Carriers when we order Ethernet services.  Sometimes you just do not know what you are getting. 

Marketing departments… let’s keep it simple, so everybody can understand.