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Carrier Ethernet bigs up

Wednesday, 26 September 2007

Largest ever plug-fest held in Geneva, but there's still a place for pre-Ethernet old faithfuls...

This week the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC AG) and 24 vendors announced the results of what is billed as the largest and most diverse public Carrier Ethernet multi-vendor interoperability test ever staged. The live test, with more than 65 devices, was geared towards network operators providing Carrier Ethernet services and is targeted at verifying the current interoperability status of a wide range of implementations as well as provisioning and fault management solutions.

“For the first time in the industry, we have evaluated large interconnected multi-vendor metro networks of PBT, T-MPLS and MPLS, independently verifying the current status of mature and new transport technologies in a joint public test,” claims EANTC managing director Carsten Rossenhoevel. “The widespread availability of Carrier Ethernet services across a broad range of virtually any core, metro and access solution is very reassuring. With growing support of Ethernet OAM and the new invention of multi-vendor provisioning, we witnessed rapidly progressing technology.”

“We participated in the full two weeks of testing, centered around OAM, end-to-end services, and protection switching,” comments Dr. Ralf-Peter Braun, senior project manager, T-Systems. “These are basic requirements to minimise our operational costs and to provide the customers of Deutsche Telekom with high-quality end-to-end services. We were pleased to see that many vendors support OAM protocols and could interoperate with each other. It is great that – regardless of the underlying transport technologies like MPLS, T-MPLS and PBT – vendors were able to create end-to-end services including inter domain interoperability offering a high level of resiliency and operational support needed for future proof technology and networks.”

“A major objective of the MEF is to ensure that end-to-end Carrier Ethernet services can be provided across global, metro and access service provider networks, using multi-vendor technology solutions,” adds Kevin Vachon, coo of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). “We recognise the efforts undertaken by more than 20 of our members to improve interoperability at the transport, management, and service layer alike - it is great to see how ubiquitous availability of Carrier Ethernet is becoming reality.”

Ubiquitous it might be getting, but don’t necessarily write off Carrier Ethernet’s forebear just yet. Earlier this year The Insight Research Corporation calculated that the Carrier Ethernet market would grow from US$1.4bn in 2007 to nearly US$6bn in 2012. The research company said that with Metro-area Ethernet services now available from virtually all major data service providers and wide-area Ethernet about to get a shot in the arm from the dominant carriers, the market is poised to take off.

According to Insight Research’s market analysis study, ‘Carrier Ethernet Services 2007-2012’ the term carrier or public Ethernet refers to any Layer 2 public network carrier service that extends Ethernet beyond the LAN and connects to customers through Ethernet interfaces. The carriers are marketing their Ethernet services under various names: transparent or native LAN, Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, GigE, metro Ethernet, Ethernet Private Line (EPL), Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL), Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (VPN), Ethernet access, Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), as well as a variety of other names.

Until recently, according to Insight Research, Metro Ethernet was the largest portion of the market as carrier Ethernet sales were primarily between points within a metropolitan area. This is expected to change, however, as major incumbents introduce long-haul Layer 2 VPNs.

“Insight’s research suggests that the many-to-many E-LAN service will be the fastest growing part of Carrier Ethernet because the economic advantages of Ethernet actually increase exponentially (as opposed to proportionally) in relation to the number of points connected,” notes Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research. “And though we expect to see an accelerating pace of Ethernet adoption across the board, we are not ready to predict that Ethernet is ready to ‘take over the world.’ Generally speaking, private line and frame relay customers are not ready to or interested in deserting longstanding services, so the migration to Ethernet is going to be slow and steady.”
John Williamson