MCI Inc. announced on Wednesday a line of managed LAN services available at three different service levels.

The company already offers managed services to about 300 customers, but previously MCI had provided those services on a custom basis only.

"Leveraging our 15-year heritage of managing large enterprise networks, MCI is helping companies build and run next-generation networks," said Jim DeMerlis, vice president for MCI Managed Network Services. "MCI?s new LAN-to-WAN capabilities give customers more options in operating increasingly complex network environments -- a real advantage given the critical role networks play in business today," he said.

The new suite of services includes three levels of management. Under the premium option, MCI will have complete responsibility for LAN management. Under the basic option, there is shared LAN management between the customer and MCI. A third option, monitoring and notification, means MCI monitors the network, informing the customer when there is a change.

With MCI?s premium service, businesses receive ongoing management and proactive notification as well as full logical and physical fault isolation designed to keep networks running continuously. Repair time under this option is 3.5 hours. MCI also can recommend and deploy the appropriate security mechanisms, ranging from policy development to access control to audit and breach detection services in this category.

With the basic package, MCI provides polling every three minutes and notification regarding network performance, with technicians dispatched if required.

Using the monitoring and notification option, a customer will get the same polling and notification, but the customer is responsible for dispatching technicians when required.

In all cases, MCI contacts the customer within 15 minutes of a fault occurring and will back up configurations at the customer?s request.

The premium service begins at US$55 each for a 300-plus small device network. Basic service begins at $45 per device, and the monitoring and notification option begins at $35 per device. These new managed services include a service activation charge of $350 per device, and there are monthly recurring charges based on the switch size and number of switches managed as well as an optional change management fee.

According to Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director at THINKstrategies, the MCI announcement indicates managed services is gaining momentum.

"There has been a lot of talk about managed services, but I think this really shows that there is a market for it. Obviously, MCI already has some customers, and this just formalizes some of the offerings," he said.

Kaplan said MCI"s biggest challenge may be getting its own organization used to selling managed services. "This is not a simple contract to sell, so they will have to learn how to make those sales, but they"ve got the infrastructure to do this," he said.