Metcalfe to Unveil 'New Ethernet' Featured
PARIS -- Is the telecom world ready for a "New Ethernet"?
Ready or not, that's what's being presented by the "Father of Ethernet" Bob Metcalfe, currently a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners and Professor of Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, on Feb. 23. (See Bob Metcalfe Goes Back To School.)
So says Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) president Nan Chen, who told a packed auditorium of hundreds of mostly baffled attendees Wednesday morning here at the MPLS and Ethernet World Congress that Metcalfe would unveil this new development in two weeks' time.
So what is this new development? Could it be Terabit Ethernet, which Metcalfe talked about some time ago? (See Bob Metcalfe on the Terabit Ethernet.)
Well, Chen isn't saying. "No comment," is his response. "Join the MEF online on Feb. 23," he adds when Light Reading asks about it.
We found a handful of others here in Paris who claimed to know what Metcalfe will unveil on Feb. 23, but they're all remaining tight-lipped. However, one industry figure with knowledge of the development suggested this would not be so much a "New Ethernet" as a "repackaging" of the existing Carrier Ethernet.
But what would that achieve? The majority of the normally well-connected delegates here at the Paris event suggested it would do little more than promote the MEF and its commercial activities, but hardly any, including those who are members of the MEF, had any idea at all what Metcalfe will unveil.
Those that were willing to hazard a guess, though, suggested the focus would be on creating a new vision for what Carrier Ethernet can achieve, especially in a cloud services environment, rather than any new technology.
Other, far more cynical suggestions were offered to Light Reading on the show floor, but repeating those ideas could cause legal problems.
Chen and Metcalfe now face the challenge of delivering against a promise made in front of the cream of Europe's Carrier Ethernet fraternity.
Will the Ethernet Emperor have any clothes? We await to see on Feb. 23.
Due to the rise of ‘dumb pipes,’ enterprises demand the delivery of high-bandwidth and high-quality service to end-users. By combining service-level specifications and bandwidth profiles of Carrier Ethernet with service quality visualization, operators can ensure a high quality of experience (QoE) for end users and ensure that service expectations are consistently met, if not exceeded.
There are many ways for a CSP to differentiate their services. There are three kinds of service differentiators that CSPs can employ: price, performance and offering. It’s important to incorporate all three of these aspects because it will enable better quality and more cost-effective Carrier Ethernet services. Check out this video for further information on why this is such an important topic:
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SINGAPORE--Carriers should invest in carrier Ethernet to boost the reliability and bandwidth of their systems, which are essential to meet the needs of enterprise customers looking to deploy business-class cloud. But they need to consider their customer profile and needs before investing, stated insiders.
Goh Boon Huat, vice president of business products at Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), acknowledged that talks of carriers becoming "irrelevant" has been making the rounds as core services such as fixed voice and SMS (short message service) are commoditized. Thus, carriers will need to rethink how they make use of their network assets and find new models to drive value for their customers, he added. The executive was a keynote speaker at the Carrier Ethernet Asia-Pacific conference held here on Thursday.
One way to do so is for carriers to package their full stack of services and network and sell these to their enterprise customers, he suggested. SingTel, for one, has integrated its basic voice and data services, IT services such as managed services, unified communications and cloud computing services "tightly" and have given customers the option of procuring these services as a bundled package or on its own, the vice president noted.
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Speaking at the recent NetEvents 2011 APAC Press & Analyst Summit in Thailand, MEF President Nan Chen outlined the proceedings of the MEF’s last quarterly meeting for 2011, held in Singapore last month, and their particular relevance for APAC business. Key issues for the region include Carrier Ethernet Multiple Classes of Service (Multi-CoS), Ethernet mobile backhaul, and the rise of wholesale Ethernet services – and all three issues were addressed by new technical specifications progressed at the Quarterly meeting. He also announced strong support for the new MEF Carrier Ethernet Certified Professional (CECP) certification program, which is already boosting the skills availability in a highly competitive market. Nan Chen explained how the letter ballot acceptance of the MEF’s Phase 2 on Multi-CoS and Mobile Backhaul Implementation Agreements – extending MEF 23 and MEF 22 respectively – is an especially important issue for the region where, without a strong legacy network of fixed line connections, it is doubly attractive to leapfrog traditional leased line connections from cell cites to core network and go for an all-Ethernet solution. According to Infonetics’ Michael Howard: “IP/Ethernet MBH is the universally accepted solution to lower the costs of growing mobile data traffic, and to facilitate migration to next generation all-IP/Ethernet networks. This two Implementation Agreements will be especially welcome for addressing explosive growth of mobile Internet traffic, as well as pointing the way to simpler 4G migration.”
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The latest edition of the NetEvents EMEA Summit in Italy set the record straight about the cloud hype through an extensive
gathering of telecom leaders who discussed the cloud merits. The hype around cloud computing is “deafening,” according to
Hype Cycle report from the Gartner Group. From multinational consulting firms and systems integrators down to freelance
consultants, they all claim a suite of cloud related services, and Gartner warns that such ”cloud washing” risks accelerating the
entire industry into a trough of disillusionment.
According to James Walker, Head of Global VPN Services, Tata Communications, the cloud is actually that wavy diagram that
we as vendors tend to put on whiteboards when we’re talking to customers. And there’s a multitude of sins that are hidden behind that wavy shape. “So you’ll get some illustrations of that wavy cloud shortly but we tend to talk about the network as obviously existing or obviously doing the service that it’s expected to do. But in fact there’s some quite serious challenges that we as carriers are starting to face about how to link together all these various platforms whether it’s private
cloud or public cloud,” he added.
Walker was clear that the cloud brings a variety of opportunities but it also brings a number of challenges. “I think the opportunities are ones that we as an industry are very focused on because it looks like there’s money attached to it hopefully. But there’s also a significant number of challenges and particularly it’s a challenge of bringing technology and networking platforms and data centers and indeed whole concepts that were originally expected to do something different and changing those to actually deliver cloud services,” commented Walker.
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- Netevents_Summit_Nov_2011.pdf (143 Download)
