At a recent MEF meeting, Mike Tighe, Director of Strategy at Verizon Business bluntly expressed the challenges of Ethernet wholesale, “When Verizon went out of our in-franchise market, it was an act of God to terminate an Ethernet circuit.” He calls it the way many providers see it: Ethernet wholesale can be a frustrating maze, but is an increasingly essential technology carriers need to expand their service footprint and drive new revenue. One of Mike’s roles is to coordinate a standardized E-NNI (Ethernet Network-to-Network Interface) spec, hopefully to reduce the reliance on acts of God, and facilitate native Ethernet interconnection.
While the MEF motors ahead, providers are already working hard to deliver Ethernet wholesale any way they can – the market demand is just too big to wait for standards to emerge. At COMPTEL this week in Orlando, the Ethernet Wholesale session provided a spectrum of information to attentive carriers – a ‘state of the art’ update on how wholesale is evolving, what challenges lie in store for the brave, the technology required, and a tactical approach to establishing a viable wholesale offering.
Ralph Santitoro, Dir. Carrier Ethernet Market Development at Fujitsu pointed out the importance of fault management, performance monitoring for SLAs, OAM support, and bandwidth policing and shaping capabilities to optimize performance. Santitoro emphasized that for effective wholesale, these features need to be applied at both the E-NNI as well as the remote UNI (customer site port). This is a key point to consider, as many Ethernet wholesale providers don’t provide these features at the client site, leaving service providers with limited ability to maintain and manage QoS at off-net locations. Accedian Networks’ Network Interface Devices (NIDs) offer one solution to this problem, providing traffic shaping, policing, MEF Carrier Ethernet termination, OAM and monitoring in a cost-efficient end-point the provider can deploy. These NIDs establish a uniform service delivery endpoint that puts QoS control back in the hands of the provider, even over wholesaled last mile links.
Covad’s CTO, Aamir Hussain resonated with the need for end-to-end performance reporting and control in his summary of the “Table Stakes” required to play in the Ethernet wholesale market. In addition to maintaining service and network availability, SLAs and QoS, Hussain also emphasized the need for a complete layer 2 & 3 service portfolio, ILEC ordering and trouble-ticking integration, automated provisioning to speed service delivery, and a large-scale service footprint. Hussain argues that carriers want to work with a single wholesale provider when possible, but that operators shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone. When offering wholesale, he said, providers should know their strengths, focus on those, then partner with others to provide a nationwide solution. Beyond the table stakes, Hussain listed some of the “delighters” that will consistently drive differentiation and reduce customer churn: managed services, web-based performance reporting portals and online self-help solutions.
XO Communications’ CTO, Randolf Nicklas, gave a sobering assessment of Ethernet wholesale, calling the cost-efficient carriage of Ethernet & IP traffic a “work in progress”. XO is certainly a leader in this space, and has a full range of offerings that traverse the U.S., but there are challenges that Nicklas would like to see ironed out that would move Ethernet wholesale towards a more standardized, feature-rich technology. Key pain points range from the lack E-NNI standards, to legacy equipment limitations, the need for better protection mechanisms, more Ethernet-aware operational support systems (OSS), and even transitioning the knowledge of “TDM-sophisticates” towards deeper Ethernet expertise. XO seems to be moving ahead on all fronts, as they are actively involved with the MEF, and are introducing VPLS-based E-LAN services to their existing E-Line and hubbing portfolio early next year. With 1,000,000 metro fiber miles, and 1,000+ collocation points, XO is certainly in position to grow into this space.
A video of this COMPTEL session will be posted here next week – be sure to come back and visit if you’d like to see the full presentations and the Q&A session that followed.
You can also learn all about Ethernet wholesale’s key requirements in our October EtherNEWS video edition.
