Best of 2007: Ethernet

Ethernet was a hot topic again this year, as the technology continued to move forward both as a business service and as a transport technology.

Matt Bross of the BT Group, which was the first service provider to embrace an Ethernet transport technology called PBT

“Hundreds of service providers worldwide are committed to Ethernet as the future ubiquitous standard for network service connectivity, and Ethernet equipment vendors are actively enabling this important transition,” says Rick Malone, principal at Vertical Systems Group Inc., which projects worldwide revenue for business Ethernet services will climb to $30.7 billion by 2012. “Based on our research, enterprise customer demand for Ethernet services is robust, providing new revenue opportunities across all geographic regions (United States, Asia/Pacific, EMEA, ROW) during the next five years.”

Vertical Systems notes that enterprise customers use Ethernet services to support their metro, regional, nationwide or global network applications, which include dedicated Internet access; Ethernet access to other network services including IP/MPLS VPNs and frame relay; Ethernet private lines; and Ethernet LAN/VPLS services.

While Ethernet services initially were delivered over fiber, Ethernet-over-copper services this year reached a tipping point, given less than 12 percent of U.S. businesses have fiber to them, according to Frost & Sullivan.

“The market for mid-Band Ethernet is potentially enormous, as businesses migrate from T1 and frame relay services to high-bandwidth Ethernet,” said Sam Masud, an analyst who recently left Frost & Sullivan.

And Infonetics Research says its recent study of 27 top-tier service providers in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific provides further evidence that Ethernet continues to go mainstream and eventually will dominate the metro space, as SONET/SDH slowly declines over the next 10 to 20 years.

Worldwide Ethernet Services Business Applications Source: Vertical Systems Group Inc.

“The most telling finding in the study is that the vast majority of service providers we interviewed have a strategy for using Ethernet instead of SONET/SDH for accessing and collecting customer traffic,” says Michael Howard, principal analyst of Infonetics Research. “Ethernet as a carrier-class technology has made considerable progress; almost 90 percent of service providers participating in the study believe Ethernet is mature for carrier-class deployments, which is much different from the attitude of two years ago.”

Meanwhile, Synergy Research Group revealed in a recent survey that nearly one quarter of operators were considering deploying provider backbone transport (PBT) — which is being standardized by the IEEE as provider backbone bridging – traffic engineering (PBB-TE) — in their networks. PBT provides Ethernet transport using point-to-point tunneling technology that adds determinism to Ethernet, enabling service providers to specify the path that an Ethernet service should take across the network with SONET-like reliability and management capabilities. By enabling PBB, service providers can define PBT tunnels and run Ethernet or other traffic types over it.

Aside from BT, which is known widely to be backing the technology for use in its 21^st Century Network, six other carriers among those surveyed are evaluating PBT in trials, Ray Mota, chief strategist for Synergy Research Group and the report’s author, said this summer. Unlike VPLS which took more than three years to gain acceptance, he said, “PBT has a head start” with such high-profile support.

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