Carrier Ethernet Industry Voices

North America drives growth in carrier router and switch market in 2Q10 

Infonetics Research released its second quarter 2010 (2Q10) Service Provider Routers and Switches market share and forecast report.

"IP core and edge router revenue in North America was the hero of the second quarter, up 15% sequentially and up 39% from this time last year, as operators put spending back on priority to handle more traffic, especially video over broadband and data and photos over mobile networks. Europe is in a holding pattern, struggling to pull out of the downturn, and is roughly 2 to 3 quarters behind North America. Although EMEA router spending was flat sequentially, it was up a nice 13% year-over-year. Asia Pacific showed a solid 10% sequential increase in router revenue, but is still behind the Chinese-stimulated 2009 pace," reports Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst for carrier and data center networks at Infonetics Research. (click Read More below)

The business case for Carrier Ethernet WAN services is obvious (well it should be :) ), primarily as a higher-bandwidth, lower-cost alternative to frame relay, it's also a an attractive alternative from legacy frame/ATM or TDM services but the key is availability.

Service providers continue to focus on enterprise customers and the benefits are real.  At a minimum, enterprises benefit from lower equipment costs, lower operations costs (OPEX), pay for services used and bandwidth required, lowest per-bit cost services, potentially lower bandwidth requirements etc.

For service providers, the benefits:  multiple services on a single interface,  reduced equipment costs, lower cost of delivery (virtually no truck rolls), revenue ramps-up faster due to less complexity, new revenue potentially - some from services never before available, and ultimately greater/improved profitability.

The MEF has been instrumental by initiating and successfully driving formal efforts to define Carrier Ethernet and the services delivered by Service Providers.    Without the five attributes defined by the MEF which distinquish Carrier Ethernet from common LAN-based Ethernet ~ Standardized services, Scalability, Reliability, Quality of Service (QoS) and Service management ~ Service Provider's would likely continue to deploy an infrastructure that  necessitates greater infrastructure, management and expense.   That said, Ethernet services can be carried over SDH/SONET and  IP/MPLS.    In the case of IP/MPLS this is a significant advantage in that Ethernet links can be transported as "pseudowires" using MPLS label switched paths (LSPs) inside an outer MPLS "tunnel".     There is so much more that could be said here...