The MEF Speaks - Carrier Ethernet - The New Ethernet for All (Cont'd)

STANDARDS AND CERTIFICATION
The MEF is working to develop standards that allow carriers to mix and match equipment from various vendors, confident that they have been tested and certified to work together across vendor boundaries.

In particular, the MEF's Carrier Ethernet Certification Program, announced on April 12, 2005, is designed to ensure global equipment/services compliance to the MEF's Carrier Ethernet standards, and the eventual interoperability of Carrier Ethernet equipment and services. The result is that service providers and carriers are able to focus important resources on provider-specific testing or other needs, rather than compliance testing. Many Vendors have already passed compliance certification, with more to follow.

Any approved product or service may be labelled “Certified Compliant to MEFx” provided it has met the relevant specifications as defined by the MEF, which specifies the test procedure.

Carrier Ethernet Standards
The MEF's technical committees have completed the following standards in defining standards of the five key carrier-class attributes noted above:
• Scalability
o MEF 11 - a framework for the User Network Interface (UNI) -
o MEF 9 - a standard abstract test suite for Ethernet services at the UNI.
• Protection
o MEF 2 – a framework and requirements for delivering 50ms resiliency
o MEF 4 - Carrier Ethernet architecture framework.
• Hard QoS
o MEF 6 - definitions for E-LAN and E-Line services.
o MEF 10 - Ethernet service attributes defining UNI to UNI communications with service model and traffic management parameters to ensure the end-to-end SLA of services delivery
• TDM support
o MEF 3 - a circuit emulation service requirement and framework
o MEF 8 – an implementation agreement of circuit emulation services over Carrier Ethernet.
• Services Management
o MEF 7 – information model of element and network management systems

Market Trends Driving Carrier Ethernet Explosion
Business Services
Bandwidth: As enterprises increasingly deploy gigabit technology internally and through the supply chain, research by analysts at RHK shows that the top driver for selecting Carrier Ethernet was higher WAN bandwidth, both for branch offices and in the data center. The key here is the ratcheting effect as the cost of local area gigabit Ethernet falls, which means more bandwidth is required between centers, and subsequently across the whole enterprise supply chain.

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