Recent industry events have seen increased focus on Ethernet wholesale, much as we saw with VoIP five years back, and wireless backhaul over the last dozen months or so. Whenever the noise gets greater, it usually means service providers are exploring – if not beginning to offer – technology roll-out on a larger scale. And that’s the sense I had by talking with Covad and XO’s CTOs at COMPTEL a few weeks back – they had Ethernet wholesale in their product lines, but it was a pretty basic service or customized per-client. Reflecting early pilot projects moving into maturity, these and other operators are planning comprehensive Ethernet wholesale offerings as key technologies come of age: SLA monitoring, Ethernet OAM for efficient service management, and higher performance ENNIUs (Ethernet Network-to-Network Interface Units) that can establish and assure QoS on a per VLAN or even per-application basis.
A survey on the EtherNEWS Blog October newsletter asks service providers to offer up how their own roll-out is going, and whether they have access to Ethernet wholesale from other carriers to help them reach off-net locations. Early results are showing that both adoption and service offerings are moving ahead with the majority of operators. It appears carriers are equally comfortable using wholesale as they are delivering it; less usage than offerings might point to new services just emerging that aren’t productized fully or advertised to providers who need them. The results show a growing confidence in Ethernet as a viable wholesale technology, and points towards growth in the years ahead as both supply and demand increase to create a healthy new market.
Still remaining to be worked out: standardized SLAs, consensus on how to measure them, and easier ways to generate customer portals for performance and billing data. These are the scaling factors that will need to be ironed out for wide-scale, differentiated service offerings, and there’s no shortage of efforts by equipment vendors and systems integrators to get this into place. Stay tuned – a future post will shed light on service oriented architectures (SOAs) and deployment automation that are relieving the pain on reporting and portals, as presented at CableTec 2009 by Accedian Networks and Rogers Communications.