The Intelligent Ethernet (Cont'd)

In addition, Ethernet wholesale services are becoming more prevalent as carriers follow their customers both in region and out of region. Infonetics Research expects wholesale Ethernet services to make up 25% of the Ethernet market through their entire 2005 to 2009 forecast horizon. Selling Ethernet services to other carriers is a much different proposition than selling to an Enterprise. Carriers tend to be more sophisticated customers who demand end-to-end SLAs for their UNI-to-NNI or UNI-to-UNI services. Often these SLAs will have rebates or guarantees associated with them and must be verified remotely in real time while the service is active for billing or rebate purposes. Again, Ethernet demarcation at both the UNI and NNI interfaces is critical to being able to address this key need of a major Ethernet market segment.



Ethernet Demarcation – What Should Carriers look for?
Customer premise Ethernet demarcation devices are now available that enable delivery of intelligent differentiated Ethernet services and provide a function that is analogous to a smartjack or CSU/DSU in a traditional data service. It is a critical step towards making Ethernet “carrier grade” for replacing traditional data services for mission critical enterprise applications. Demarcation also ensures that Ethernet services are profitable since the majority of operations expenses occur at the edge of the network where demarcation devices can reduce expenses at the same time that they are providing more service intelligence.

Ethernet demarcation requires a Network Interface Device (NID) for Operations, Administration & Maintenance (OA&M) functionality plus a User Network Interface (UNI) for providing advanced services definition. The NID OAM capabilities should include service monitoring functions such as SLA monitoring to determine service availability, dropped frames, frame delay and frame jitter. It should also incorporate maintenance and test functions such as: test pattern generation and port/VLAN level loopbacks to enable RFC-2544 testing. The service UNI is necessary to provide service intelligence for defining CIR (committed information rate), EIR (excess information rate) and burst-size of individual ports, priorities or VLANs. It should use 802.1p, 802.1q, TOS or DSCP to classify traffic into an EVC, VLAN or priority level. In short, the UNI provides the service personality of the Ethernet offering.

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