Carrier Ethernet services have come along way. Now it's time to take them all the way to the customer premises with new CPE switches that can enable end-to-end SLAs - even at the application level
Carrier Ethernet services have been growing increasingly popular as both enterprises and service providers come to grips with the maturing and increasingly reliable technology. In April, Frost & Sullivan forecast that even with a recession on, Ethernet services will see 35-40% growth in takeup this year, while retail Ethernet service revenues will grow 32% (CAGR) to $4.7 billion by 2013.
But for all the attractions of Ethernet services for enterprise customers - namely lower costs, simple architecture and LAN compatibility - they're still perceived by many as a best-effort service.
Part of the reason for this perception is historical - early Ethernet services at the turn of the century were in fact best-effort. They were also cheaper than Frame Relay/ATM services, and while Carrier Ethernet evolved into something with the OAM capabilities to offer SLAs guaranteeing performance, cheapness remained a top selling point for years, and in the world of marketing psychology, 'cheap' is a word not usually associated with quality.
However, another factor coming into 2009 is that Ethernet service SLAs are still limited compared to FR/ATM. That's because Carrier Ethernet equipment deployments to date - and the parallel standardization efforts of industry bodies like the IEEE and the Metro Ethernet Forum to make Ethernet carrier-class - have been understandably focused on the core and the edge of the network. However, that also means that service providers can only offer Ethernet SLAs as far as their PoPs, says Rotem Salomonovitch, deputy CTO APAC for Alcatel-Lucent's IP division.
'At the moment, service providers can only offer SLAs for Ethernet to the PoP,' he explains. 'The service from the PoP to the customer premises is not governed by an SLA, so they're offering best-effort services on that last mile or first mile.'
That needs to change, says Eve Griliches from IDC, because the future growth of Carrier Ethernet depends on adding more value to the service. In the case of business services, Griliches wrote in a recent research note, 'end-to-end SLAs need significant improvement, especially when it comes to provisioning and management of those services.' (See Viewpoint on 10).
Luckily, the solution is already starting to emerge: Carrier Ethernet switches for the CPE that effectively extend the Ethernet demarcation point straight to the customer premises. Alcatel-Lucent was the first out of the gate in February this year with a CPE version of its aggregation edge routers, and other Carrier Ethernet vendors are expected to follow suit in the coming months. And Carrier Ethernet CPE is promising plenty of value-add - not just end-to-end SLAs, but extending the Ethernet SLA itself to the application level.
Watch your apps
In fact, says Salomonovitch, it\'s enterprise demand for application support that's driving the need for end-to-end Ethernet SLAs in the first place.
'Enterprises are demanding SLAs for real-time voice and video applications,' he says. 'To do that, you really need to be able to provide SLAs all the way to the premises, not the PoP.'