Carriers adding pizazz to Ethernet services

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
07/04/05

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Voice and video meet Ethernet
* Links related to Optical Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Carriers adding pizazz to Ethernet services

By Jim Duffy

BellSouth next year plans to turn up metropolitan Ethernet
offerings that support multiple service classes per port to
enable more reliable voice and video transmission for business
customers.

The company is but one of scores of carriers bulking up their
Ethernet portfolios with class-of-service features, and scalable
multipoint capabilities for voice and video support. Verizon,
for example, recently said it plans to add three service classes
to its switched Ethernet services, as well as other
enhancements.

Carriers have good reason to do this: Ethernet service revenue,
currently at $6 billion, is expected to hit $20 billion or
better by 2008, according to research firms IDC and Infonetics.

BellSouth will ante up in the first half of 2006 with its
Virtual Ethernet Service (VES), an MPLS-enabled offering that
will support four classes of service assigned on a per-virtual
LAN (VLAN) basis. The four service classes will be similar to
what BellSouth now offers customers of its MPLS-based RFC 2547
Layer 3 VPN service: real time for voice, interactive for video,
business critical and best effort.

"With VES, the concept is to take your traditional Ethernet
private line or switched Ethernet service - which is really a
port-based service where you have one class per port - and
virtualize the port into a class-per-VLAN model," says Suzy
Gray, BellSouth director of emerging data transport.

Analysts say virtualizing the Ethernet port could enable
different types of service - such as frame relay - to be
terminated on Ethernet, facilitating the migration from a legacy
data service to a new one.

"That's an example of the kind of thing that these virtualized
connections provide," says Thomas Nolle, president of
consultancy CIMI. "You try to make a series of remote sites
appear as though they are on an Ethernet LAN even though those
sites are connected via some other type of service."

VES will be the basis of a Layer 2 metropolitan Ethernet service
and an access option to the Layer 3 VPN service connecting
metropolitan areas within BellSouth's nine-state region, Gray
says. As an access option, VES will support multiple service
classes per VLAN.

Users are anxious to try VES.

"We use [BellSouth's] existing Metro Ethernet solution to
connect to remote workgroups" in clinics and primary care
facilities, says Dave Dully, director of technology at Baptist
Health in Jacksonville, Fla. VES "would offer more flexibility
in prioritizing the service for clinical applications and
voice."

"We've got places right now where we can't put out VoIP because
we can't get the QoS we need," says Mick Gunter, IT director at
Blue Rhino, a propane tank exchange company in Winston-Salem,
N.C. "I've been talking to BellSouth for probably two years-plus
so it's exciting that the products are starting to actually come
out on the marketplace."

Though VES will be MPLS-enabled, Gray stopped short of saying it
will be based on Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS ), an
increasingly popular IETF proposal for MPLS-based Layer 2
multipoint Ethernet services. BellSouth views VPLS as more
beneficial between metropolitan areas rather than within them.

"I would say that VES is more VPLS-like in the context of having
the ability to do multipoint capability," Gray says. "However,
something that's very specific to VPLS is inter-domain
connectivity. What we're looking right now at VES is still
metro-Ethernet specific."

For inter-metropolitan connectivity, BellSouth will encourage
metropolitan Ethernet users to employ VES as an access method
for its Layer 3 VPN offering while it continues to evaluate
VPLS, Gray says.

BellSouth was considering VPLS and Ethernet Relay as foundation
technologies for VES and as a way to "granularize" higher-speed
(10M bit/sec and above) Ethernet services, says Mark Kaish,
BellSouth vice president of next-generation solutions. BellSouth
also plans to offer a sub-10M bit/sec symmetric, QoS-capable
service for corporate networks next year.

Ethernet Relay is a frame relay-like feature of Cisco 7600
series routers - which anchor BellSouth's metropolitan Ethernet
service - that lets a service provider multiplex multiple
point-to-point and multipoint connections from one or several
subscribers onto a single Ethernet port. However, Gray intimated
that Ethernet Relay is not the answer for VES.

"Ethernet Relay is kind of a vendor-coined term that implies a
connection-oriented approach where you literally have a
point-to-point service," she says.

BellSouth has not yet established pricing or per
class-of-service service-level agreement metrics for VES.
Generally, Ethernet services cost about $900 to $1,000 per month
for 10M bit/sec throughput and $5,000 per month for 100M
bit/sec.

Pricing VES will be one of BellSouth's challenges, Nolle says.

"The users have no interest in VPNs except insofar as they save
money," he says. "The offering is going to have to be something
between a 25% and a 35% cost reduction vs. the prior service, or
the guy's not interested because the buyer perceives the
conversion as a risk."
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Jim Duffy

Jim Duffy is managing editor of Network World's service provider
equipment coverage
<http://www.networkworld.com/topics/service-providers.html>. He
has 18 years of high-tech reporting experience, including over
12 years at Network World. Previously, he was senior editor at
Computer Systems News and associate editor/reporter at
Electronic News and MIS Week. He can be reached at
<mailto:jduffy@nww.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Ciena
NetworkWorld Special Report - The Adaptive WAN: The factors
driving WAN evolution

A combination of business and technology trends are changing the
demands on the enterprise WAN. This NetworkWorld Special Report
explores some of the key business and technology trends that are
driving and enabling the evolution of the enterprise WAN and how
the enterprise WAN can become adaptive to support these trends.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=107749
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