Everyone has a mobile phone. How many of you have a tablet? I won’t say iPad because some of you don’t have iPads but how many of you have a tablet? So that’s about 50/60%.
And how many of you here have a laptop? Virtually everybody has at least a laptop and a mobile phone and most of you have a tablet. And you’re using them all? Do you have a problem if you can’t connect all of them to the Wi-Fi at the same time? That’s the problem I have. So for me connectivity is really critical in every device.
I also want that everything will be somewhere else and somewhere else for me is what you call the Cloud. I want my storage somewhere else, I don’t want to carry around with me, I don’t want it sitting on hard disks in my office, I want it out there somewhere else in the Cloud.
I want my power consumption to be somewhere else, I want it to be sitting in data centres, I want it to be anywhere else but on my battery or in my room heating my room up. And finally, I want all of my applications, all of my software, everything connected working all the time, I want somebody else maintaining it, I don’t want to be my own IT manager.
So addicted to connectivity and I want everything like this somewhere else. In other words, what I want is that Ethernet LAN I used to have in the office, do any of you remember this, you used to go in the office and you used to plug into the Ethernet LAN and the servers were working and the software update was done and everything was magic, it never went down.
And we got used to it, Ethernet LANs and IT Managers became a part of our lives. And then what happened? We started travelling and we started working from home, we started working from the car and it’s not like anything at LAN anymore. So what we really want is a global Ethernet LAN, that’s really what we want. We want to be able to plug in anywhere, whether it’s in the hotel or if it’s the plan landing and we want to feel like we’re in that office with our LAN, we want a global LAN. And we don’t want to be our own IT Managers, we don’t want to manage the devices and the IP addresses and all that good stuff, we want somebody else to do it, we want a service provider to do it.
So my contention is I want a global Ethernet service wherever I am that fits my needs and I dare to say that that’s true not only for individuals but also for businesses, for everybody. Everybody wants that global Ethernet service that they can plug in anywhere that’s as reliable and as fast and as simple as the LAN in their office. So that is what 2.0 is pointing to.
It’s not the solution, it’s not the be all and end all, it’s one step along the way to that truly seamless global Ethernet LAN. And it comes in four flavours; it comes in ELine, E-LAN, E-Tree and E-Access. Perhaps they’re terms that you’re less familiar with. You might have heard of point-to-point, multipoint and rooted multipoint wholesale, but really that Ethernet service that you want is encapsulated in everything that the MEF, the Metro Ethernet Forum, defines and promotes and certifies.
