Techie
6:22 PM | Saturday | 13 March 2010

The Carrier Ethernet services offered by Globe Business have now been certified by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) as conforming to the MEF 9 specifications for service providers. Globe is the first Philippine telecommunications company to have managed such a feat.

The MEF is a nonprofit global industry alliance that aims to accelerate the worldwide adoption of carrier-class Ethernet services and networks. Currently helmed by President and Director Nan Chen, the MEF is composed of over 150 of the world's top service providers and major equipment vendors. The MEF crafts technical specifications and implementation agreements to ensure the seamless interoperability of Carrier Ethernet services worldwide and certifies companies based on compliance with these specifications. MEF certification, attained by passing rigorous compliance tests conducted by the MEF-approved certification test laboratory Iometrix, is thus considered a quality assurance symbol the world over.

MEF 9 is a service-oriented test specification that ensures that conditions necessary for the delivery of services have specific User Network Interface (UNI) and Ethernet Virtual Connection (EVC) service attributes. The MEF 9 certification process tests for conformance of Ethernet services with the MEF's standards at the UNI, where the areas of responsibility of the service provider and the end user intersect.

Globe's Ethernet Line, Ethernet Virtual Private Line and Ethernet LAN services were tested against the MEF 9 specification. The testing process itself is composed of two steps: a lab test in which the service provider being evaluated builds out a service infrastructure in a lab for initial verification of service compliance, and a field test that incorporates end-to-end tests performed on production circuits.

Carrier Ethernet: A backgrounder

Carrier Ethernet is a ubiquitous and standardized carrier-class service and network. It can satisfy the growing worldwide need for a simple, easy-to-manage, consistently high-quality, scalable, and always-on connection that is capable of streaming information, data, voice or video as demanded by the end user.

Carrier Ethernet builds on the inherent advantages of Ethernet itself. Invented by Robert Metcalfe in 1975, Ethernet is a well-established LAN standard which makes use of a very common interface, has specifications all the way up to 10Gbps, is significantly less expensive than DS-3 or STM-1 interfaces, and is scalable up to 100Mbps or 1Gbps at increments as small as 1Mbps without requiring interface changes. These points convinced telecommunications companies to come up with Carrier Ethernet.

Carrier Ethernet is a service provided worldwide via standardized equipment and, as such, its adoption requires no changes whatsoever to customer LAN equipment or networks. In addition, existing network connectivity such as TDM traffic and signaling is easily accommodated. Carrier Ethernet is also scalable in terms of bandwidth from 1Mbps to 10Gbps and beyond in granular increments, and it encompasses Access, Metro, National and Global Services over a very wide variety of physical infrastructures that are implemented by an equally wide range of service providers. Carrier Ethernet networks are thus capable of handling an extremely wide range of business, communications, information and entertainment applications that also incorporate data, voice and video capabilities.

Carrier Ethernet networks can deal with incidents without end users ever being impacted. They can meet some of the most exacting reliability requirements by being able to detect and recover from problems extremely rapidly - in many cases, as quickly as 50ms. In addition, they also feature an extremely wide choice and granularity of bandwidth and quality-of-service options. Lastly, customers and service providers are able to centrally manage and monitor the Carrier Ethernet network via independent implementations.

Carrier Ethernet services may include E-Line, E-LAN and E-Tree services. E-Line Services creates a point-to-point connection between two Ethernet ports and are used to create Ethernet Private Lines, Virtual Private Lines and Ethernet Internet Access. On the other hand, E-LAN Services connect a set of Ethernet ports to form an Ethernet network. They are used to construct Multipoint L2 Virtual Private Networks and transparent Local Area Network Service, and can be used as foundations for Internet Protocol Television and multicast networks. Lastly, E-Tree services, just as their name suggests, evoke trees; they are networks linking one or more "roots" and a set of "leaves" or customer endpoints, but in this particular setup, the "leaves" are unable to communicate with one another. E-Tree services are expected to be used in video on demand, triple-play and mobile backhaul infrastructures.

Globe Business has been offering Carrier Ethernet services since 2000, delivering these services through its BAX (Broadband Access Service) network. Thanks to its significant investments in the IP-Converged Optical Network (ICON) upgrade and other aspects of its network infrastructure, Globe is eminently capable of working with clients, both present and future. ICON is the first and only pure IP MPLS (Internet Protocol - Multi Protocol Label Switching) network in the Philippines, and ICON's reliable and secure network backbone ensures that Globe Ethernet service users enjoy high resiliency and low latency.

The worldwide market has been responding very favorably to companies' Carrier Ethernet offerings. The market for business Ethernet services has been projected to increase to nearly $39 billion by 2013, and vigorous enterprise customer demand for these services has been projected for the next five years. Revenue from each of the regional Carrier Ethernet market segments (the US, Asia/Pacific, EMEA and RoW) is expanding at a rate more than double that of competing technologies.

In the photo: Globe Business' Rommel Macapagal and Gilbert Virtucio