Lisa Pierce: Much to weigh with metro Ethernet services

Keeping Pace

Businesses interested in becoming early adopters of metropolitan and long-haul Ethernet services should consider the following criteria when evaluating providers:

— Ownership of the fibre: ILECs and large CLECs own their networks. Most providers that only offer Ethernet services don’t.

— Resiliency of the infrastructure: some providers provision service on redundant rings with standby service. Others provision service on a single strand, with no failover protection. Some carriers’ network management capabilities prevent over-subscription while others are not as sophisticated and may experience congestion.

— Performance warranties: Preliminary service-level agreements and service-level objectives exist, but metrics vary sharply by provider.

Three distinct types of service have emerged:

— Services aimed at the companies, typically offered as managed Layer-3 VPN services and include tunnelling, encryption and firewalls.

— Services targeted at the service provider and carrier market provide true Layer-2 Ethernet capabilities, and like their enterprise services cousins, are proprietary services managed on an end-to-end basis.

— At the very high end, transport-centric wavelength services targeted at carriers, value-added service providers and ultra-large companies provide pure, point-to-point bandwidth (OC-12, OC-48 and OC-192).

Providers that focus on serving enterprise customers typically offer a variety of services. In contrast, many new providers only offer Ethernet and/or wavelength service.

Even though Ethernet is a worldwide standard for LANs, all existing metro Ethernet services are managed by providers on an end-to-end basis and include the routers or cards to interconnect the LAN and metropolitan-area network (MAN). Customers have no choice of vendor equipment, and multi-carrier connectivity is only achieved through provider business relationships.

One of the stated goals of the recently formed Metropolitan Ethernet Forum is to specify the necessary interfaces to support inter-provider Ethernet MAN transparency, but the forum has just begun, making it too soon to speculate on a timetable for the implementation of a future specification.

Pierce is a research fellow at Giga Information Group Inc.. She can be reached at [email protected].

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Featured Articles

Cybersecurity in 2024: Priorities and challenges for Canadian organizations 

By Derek Manky As predictions for 2024 point to the continued expansion...

Survey shows generative AI is a top priority for Canadian corporate leaders.

Leaders are devoting significant budget to generative AI for 2024 Canadian corporate...

Related Tech News

Tech Jobs

Our experienced team of journalists and bloggers bring you engaging in-depth interviews, videos and content targeted to IT professionals and line-of-business executives.

Tech Companies Hiring Right Now