Carrier Ethernet –
Carrier Ethernet continues to grow strongly as a market, and also in the multiplicity of its uses. It is in service with many carriers and service providers for the pushing of IP traffic onto the global network, but it is equally handy for those looking to plug the local loop gap within regional and metro areas, getting traffic efficiently and cost- effectively to its final destination. Ethernet allows the same quality of service and the same high bandwidth levels to be assured right the way along the chain. To the initiated, it’s the obvious first choice for a range of functions. And yet carrier Ethernet is a young market, and a standard that is still a long way from universal acceptance in the wide area. There are plenty of pockets of resistance, in fact, where Ethernet is largely shunned in favour of the familiar comfort of an older generation of technology.
One thinks of Europe and the US as being the spiritual heartland of carrier Ethernet. But even so there is work to be done by carriers serving those regions to convince a resistant element within their wholesale customer base that Ethernet is best.
PERCEIVED SAFE OPTION
“A lot of our mobile operator customers have always used SDH, and there are some that we’re currently trying to convert to the idea that Ethernet is equally safe and reliable, and that they won’t lose a whole lot of calls,” says Mattias Fridstrom, head of product portfolio at Teliasonera. “We’ve still got some way to go, as SDH really is seen as the safe option by these operators. It’s just that for the amount of traffic they are facing, measured now in Gb not Mb, it is not enough. It’s enough if you only need a few circuits, sure.” On the evidence of Teliasonera, there are other sectors
where the carrier Ethernet message has even further to go: “There’s a big problem of trust within the broadcast industry,” says Fridstrom. “They don’t want to talk about Ethernet at all, as they don’t see it as good enough for the high service quality they demand. There are plenty of major enterprises in other sectors we talk to in Sweden, and in Germany too, like banks,
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next steps
Although the carrier Ethernet market is growing strongly there is still resistance to its take-up which carriers are working hard to overcome. What then are the drivers for growth?
that also want SDH only. Their IT departments know SDH well and are less familiar with IP and Ethernet.” The education process, he says, is an ongoing and at times it is a seemingly never-ending challenge: “We talk to everyone about how we’d like to run their traffic over Ethernet, because it’s a cost-effective option and will lead to lower prices for them,” he says. “The only way to convert the slower customers is to show the value that they’ll be getting. The problem of course is that SDH does work very well. Our SDH network is extremely reliable. We assumed three years ago that, by now, we would not have an SDH network any more. I see three, maybe more, years before the message is fully understood by all.”
GEOGRAPHY MATTERS The densest penetration of Ethernet in the world is probably to be found in north America: “We’re very comfortable with Ethernet, and have been offering services based on it since 2001,” says Felipe Alvarez, president at RCN Metro, a not-untypical north American Ethernet enthusiast. RCN Metro has high bandwidth, low latency metro networks in places like New York, Chicago and latterly Toronto with which it serves the needs of banks and other users of high performance networks. “We now offer 10Gb at the edge, and there will be more Ethernet developments as the year progresses – enhancing our offer with QoS for example,” says Alvarez. “There’s a lot of other carriers looking to leverage our network as part of their solution. The challenge is where we’re looking at a location that’s off-net, where we need another service provider we can work with. The MEF 26 standard will make Ethernet interconnection easy, more like Sonet.” Asia, by stark contrast to north America and Europe, has a very
patchy record of carrier Ethernet adoption, according to Tejaswini Tilak, head of product management for Asia at Telstra International. “Asia diverges a great deal between different countries – in level of deployment of Ethernet, in the kind of services they have, and in the level of market maturity,” she says. “In Japan for example you have
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