Where do Carrier Ethernet implementations stand today? After six months of preparation and a two-week hot staging with 60 engineers from 24 vendors, here is the latest news for the Carrier Ethernet World Congress ‘09: Despite the global economic crisis, the majority of Carrier Ethernet vendors (listed on the next page) continue to develop new products with consideration for multi-vendor interoperability.
Our tests show that the technology becomes broader — opening up new markets such as in E-NNI and LTE backhaul. It becomes also deeper — enabling advanced end-to-end, multi-vendor fault management. And it certainly gets more mature — for example, Synchronous Ethernet interoperability.
On the other hand, more deployments in more areas also results in growing challenges for the technology and continuous work for the standards bodies: There is plenty of work to standardize MPLS-TP; E-NNI Phase 1 is in its final stages of standardization in the MEF but not quite fully implemented yet, and good quality synchronization with IEEE-1588:2008 is possible but cannot be taken for granted.
“Global Interconnect”, the latest MEF project, is a topic of high visibility these days. Service providers have been connecting their Carrier Ethernet networks for a while — we believe the future will belong to scalable and resilient interconnects, successfully tested this time with MPLS and Ethernet. ENNI failure recovery times were on the long side - understandable given all the protocol translations from one network to the other, but we hope for improvements.
Our Ethernet OAM tests advanced further for both Link and Service OAM. The vendors accepted and mastered the challenge. In the end most issues were configurational: Vendors did not agree how to carry CFM across the network (S-VLAN tagged, untagged, with/without MPLS label) — clarification by standards bodies seems to be required.
On the transport side, MPLS-TP pre-standard, sometimes even pre-IETF-draft testing was interesting. There are still a lot of strategic questions to be decided but technical progress is moving fast. Furthermore, it was a surprise to see PBB-TE back on multiple vendors’ agenda. Finally, we tested native Ethernet ring resiliency (ERPS / G.8032).
For the complete White Paper, download the PDF.
