Seven Providers Win Interoperability Certification from MEF

The Metro Ethernet Forum today announced seven service providers that have been certified as complying with its global Carrier Ethernet Service definitions.

The group is made up of AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp., Cablevision Lightpath (the first cable operator to apply), Met-Net, ntl:Telewest Business (the first European service provider to apply), Qwest Communications International Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc.

“It’s all about interoperability – customers want the simplicity, savings and flexibility of Carrier Ethernet, and global service certification helps the end user to choose suitable service providers. It’s the key facilitator for consistent, end-to-end service between regions, nations and continents,” said MEF President Nan Chen, who along with Bob Mandeville, president and founder of Iometrix, the company responsible for the conformance testing, today presented the service providers with their certification.

The testing involves three key stages. In the initial negotiation stage the service provider needs to prove to Iometrix it has a commercial carrier Ethernet service offering that is certifiable according to any or all of Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet Virtual Private Line or ELAN (multipoint networking) definitions from the MEF 9 specification.

This leads to the second phase – lab testing – where the service provider is required to construct a facsimile of the production network supporting their carrier Ethernet service, and then Iometrix run approximately 244 test cases on that system to pave the way for the third, field testing phase.

For the field tests, Iometrix studies the actual customer network’s topology and requires the provider to build a circuit crossing both the aggregation and core layers of the network – typically a metro area network spanning tens or hundreds of miles that is representative of a real customer circuit. Probes built by Iometrix are then connected to run the tests remotely.

MEF www.MetroEthernetForum.org

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