Why should corporate IT care about metropolitan-area network services based on native Ethernet?
What is the Metro Ethernet Forum working on to further promote native Ethernet services? Our goals are twofold. One is to define Ethernet services as a standard for the metro area. We want to have standard Ethernet service offerings. Secondly, we want to make Ethernet carrier-class: the architecture, protocols, management and Ethernet-based transport protocols. We have defined three Ethernet services today in draft form. The first is Ethernet virtual private lines. The second is Ethernet Private LAN, called EPLn. That specified multipoint-to-multipoint services to connect sites in metro areas. The other is a user network interface … a demarcation point between the service provider and user’s network. What’s coming next? The next goal is a metro Ethernet protection mechanism. Switches use the Spanning-Tree Protocol to converge when a link or node dies. That takes 30 to 45 seconds. That’s not acceptable to carriers. One draft we’re working on is a metro Ethernet Multiprotocol Label Swi
