What you need to know about Carrier Ethernet
A changing economy cannot always witness a constant growth in any sector. Very few industries have taken a strong place in the market and stood the tests of time. Industry analysts are predicting a great future in - Carrier Ethernet.
History
Carrier Ethernet has become dominant in most Enterprise and Business Networks. It was invented by Bob Metcalfe for the Xerox, Palo Alto laboratories in 1972. It is a fairly simple protocol that has scaled to hundreds of thousands of times faster speeds and consistently been able to adapt to meet the needs and demands of new markets. Ethernet has become the default standard for the LAN. It has been continuously re-inventing itself.
How Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) Started
In 2001, Metro Ethernet Forum was founded as a non-profit industry international consortium to dedicate itself to worldwide adoption of Carrier Ethernet networks and service. The principal concept was to bring the simplicity and cost model of Ethernet to the wide area network.
MEF came up with five key attributes to establish Ethernet in WAN Technologies. The WAN providers should -
- Provide service oriented Design Standards.
- Know Economy of scale from the resulting converged business, residential and wireless networks sharing the same infrastructure and services.
- Know the resiliency - restoration capability to support the TDM traffic and help in the data flow over switched networks.
- Opt for Service level agreements to providing quality service to multimedia standards.
- Check Operations and Maintenance (OAM) capabilities allowing connectivity verification, rapid recovery, and performance measurement.
Accordingly, MEF came up with this new Carrier Ethernet with the idea of widely understood Ethernet with little training required.
Advantages of Carrier Ethernet
- MEF’s adoption of the two certificate programs to train people on Carrier Ethernet services and Equipment worked well for Business professionals and a clear hike in the sales caught everyone’s attention.
- It has seen a dramatic change because of video and mobile Broadband.
- Hosted managed services, hosted desktop services, managed storage and backup, voice solutions are some of the services offered by the resellers for the customers providing them with more flexibility.
- It can access networks to provide availability to a much wider class of user over fibre, copper, cable, PON, and wireless.
- Business applications including cloud computing, interactive services, voice and high definition video conferencing are all in need of this simple-yet-breath-taking technology today; all, while retaining the cost model and simplicity of Ethernet.
Carrier Ethernet in Today’s Scenario
Ethernet’s ubiquitous presence in the LANs worldwide drives down the cost of Ethernet as a technology. Hence apart from the large enterprises, smaller businesses and start-ups are increasingly adopting this technology wanting to accelerate their sales. Moving forward, analysts described Carrier Ethernet technologies and products as permanent, ingrained, inseparable and growing part of service provider networks. Ethernet is really a family of networking standards that dictates how data should travel across a distance.
MEF celebrates its tenth anniversary this year with nearly 200 worldwide members including telecommunications service providers, cable MSOs, network equipment / software manufacturers, semiconductors vendors and testing organizations.
Not to forget, Global Business today certainly has something to cheer about too.