As I am writing this note, our team prepares to ship five tons of equipment — more than 100 devices under test from 24 participating vendors — to Warsaw in Poland and, later, some of it to Hong Kong.
The new Eastern European location of the Carrier Ethernet World Congress and the flourishing Carrier Ethernet World APAC conference in the Asia Pacific region are symbolic for Carrier Ethernet expansion into new markets and applications. Analysts across the board see two thirds of the world’s Carrier Ethernet market volume in Europe and APAC, with doubledigit cumulated annual growth rates. More carriers than ever before substitute legacy private lines with Carrier Ethernet offerings for businesses, consumers and mobile backhaul.
mobile backhaul solutions are driving a lot of innovation in the industry. It is great to see that the industry keeps pace with challenging operator requirements, even in multi-vendor scenarios. With the advent of Long Term Evolution (LTE), six vendors interoperated successfully in the world’s first multi-vendor end-to-end phase clock synchronization test.
Ethernet-based microwave and millimeter-wave solutions — helping to overcome the fiber gap in the last mile, specifically to cell sites — are another important area of innovation. Five otherwise competitive vendors joined our test for a collaborative evaluation of their latest advances side by side, such as adaptive modulation, integration in Ethernet OAM, and clock synchronization support. The speed of technological advances in this sector is amazing as well, and certainly fueled by the strong competition. A range of high availability technologies were a recurring topic this year. Enterprises and mobile operators recognize the cost of a network outage -- with IPTV deployments, highly available aggregation networks are even a need for consumer services. Draft and pre-draft standard MPLS-TP protection, Ethernet ring protection (ERPS) and pseudowire redundancy in the access were three main focus areas. We saw most advances with eight interoperable solutions in ERPS (up from four last time). Management topics, specifically OAM for fault management and performance monitoring, are on the agenda for many service provider Requests for Proposal (RFPs) now. At EANTC, these tests are a staple -- we have tested Ethernet OAM since 2005 and Y.1731 performance monitoring since 2008. It is great to witness how the industry matures. Delay performance monitoring went really well with 12 implementations; there is still more work upcoming for loss performance monitoring.
This year's EANTC Carrier Ethernet interoperability test shows the industry in an intermediate state. Basic services were taken up across 23 vendors in minutes rather than days this time; key technologies such as Ethernet OAM, MPLS signaling, Synchronous Ethernet worked like a charm; now advanced solutions for challenging markets are being targeted. Carrier Ethernet is on the way to the next level of enlightenment.
For the complete White Paper, download the PDF.
