Ethernet Interconnect Nirvana Nears, MEF Says

SUPERCOMM — Interconnection between Ethernet service providers is going to get a whole lot easier come February 2010 when the Metro Ethernet Forum expects to pass its E-NNI (Ethernet network-to-network interconnection) specification. Meanwhile, at SUPERCOMM, MEF is beating the drum about the importance of standardized interconnection to the proliferation of Ethernet services and to the continued growth of Ethernet service providers.

“If a service provider wants to be able to successfully grow its Ethernet services revenue, they have to be able to deliver complete coverage,” said Kevin Vachon, COO of MEF. “Interconnect will enable coverage to occur and it will enable more rapid provisioning times and it will also enable end-to-end service level agreements.”

Vachon said Ethernet’s ability to rival legacy services such as E1 and T1 rests on making it as easy as possible for service providers to buy and sell and deliver it.

“That’s the problem we are trying to solve,” he said. “We think we are on our way.”

Step one, he said, was to get service providers conforming to MEF service definitions for ELINE, ELAN and Etree. Step two was to certify as many vendors and service providers as possible; to date 75 vendors and 30 service providers have been certified. Step three is to get common networks interconnected in a standardized way with the E-NNI specification.

“The business and operational pieces have to come along as well,” he said.

To that end, with the new E-NNI spec, MEF will include an implementation guide to outline a standardized interconnect arrangement. The MEF also has developed a few tools, including an interconnect questionnaire, which provides a standard template that information service providers need to exchange when agreeing to interconnect. In addition, MEF has a Global Services Directory, which indexes which carriers provide Ethernet services and where. Presently, only MEF members are listed.

Even with that, Vachon said there is still work to be done. MEF announced 12 months ago a Global Interconnection Program to educate the industry – service providers and the ecosystem – on what’s required.

At SUPERCOMM 2009, GIP is front and center in the organization’s booth, and global interconnection was the subject of a MEF workshop Tuesday.

Besides the forthcoming E-NNI specification, there are two other MEF specifications that make Carrier Ethernet interconnection possible that have been developed over the past 18 months. These include MEF 23 Class of Service Phase 1 Implementation Agreement, which offers guidance on mapping classes of service between service providers, and MEF 20 UNI Type 2 Implementation Agreement, which includes specifications for multivendor link OAM.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines