Guaranteed Quality of Service

As Carrier Ethernet is targeted towards carriers of varying size and business model, it is beneficial to first define the services provided by such entities. What makes a service “a carrier-grade service?” First and foremost, the service must be both affordable for the target market and profitable for the carrier. World-wide, carriers are looking for shorter return profiles for their capital expense investments. By marrying the high growth, profitable services with cost-effective technologies, carriers will improve their bottom line. A second key attribute of a carrier-grade service is its robustness. Customer support centers are expensive and human involvement is extremely costly. The services must have very high availability and ideally mechanisms that enable self-healing and optimize troubleshooting. This brings us to the third important component: manageability. Customers and services are progressively more dynamic in nature. This requires an adaptable service profile with corresponding management and operations flexibility. The rigidity and customer turn-up lead-time of circuit-based approaches is giving way to superior packet-based Carrier Ethernet technology.

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) pioneered the term Carrier Ethernet by classifying several significant technical attributes that distinguish it from the more familiar enterprise Ethernet (See image at above).

Formed in 2001, the MEF is a non-profit organization chartered with the mission of accelerating worldwide adoption of carrier class Ethernet networks and services. This mission is in direct response to the opportunities made available by:

• The need and demand for a simple ubiquitous service
• Requirement to scale network services to enable rapid deployment of applications critical to enterprises and service providers.
• Availability of low cost, high bandwidth of Ethernet, beyond the LAN
• Convergence of business, residential and wireless services

Composed of about 90 members spanning international and domestic carriers and service providers, equipment and silicon manufacturers, the MEF has the expertise and momentum necessary for influencing the industry. It pioneered the term Carrier Ethernet by classifying several significant technical attributes that distinguish it from the more familiar enterprise Ethernet.

Continue

• Part 1:
  Overview
• Part 2:
  Key Attributes
• Part 3:
  Features
• Part 4:
  Applications
• Part 5:
  Carrier Ethernet Market Projections
• Part 6:
  Summary