Seven SPs Win Interoperability Certification From MEF

Carrier Ethernet got another push forward in late April as the Metro Ethernet Forum certified seven service providers as compliant with its global Carrier Ethernet Service definitions. That group includes AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp., Cablevision Lightpath (the first cable operator to apply), Met-Net, ntl:Telewest Business (the first European service provider to apply), Qwest Communications International Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc.

“It’s all about interoperability — customers want the simplicity, savings and flexibility of carrier Ethernet, and global service certification helps the end user to choose suitable service providers. It’s the key facilitator for consistent, end-to-end service between regions, nations and continents,” says MEF President Nan Chen, noting that as of last April the forum had another 10 service providers in the certification testing pipeline, with 10 additional carriers expected to be added in short order.

The testing involves three key stages. In the initial negotiation stage, the service provider needs to prove to Iometrix, the company responsible for the conformance testing, that they have a commercial carrier Ethernet service offering that is certifiable according to any or all of Ethernet Private Line (EPL), Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) or ELAN (multipoint networking) definitions from the MEF 9 specification.

This leads to the second phase, lab testing, where the service provider is required to construct a facsimile of the production network supporting their carrier Ethernet service, and then Iometrix runs some 244 test cases on that system to pave the way for the third phase — field testing.

For the field tests, Iometrix studies the actual customer network’s topology and requires the provider to build a circuit crossing both the aggregation and core layers of the network — typically a MAN spanning tens or hundreds of miles that is representative of a real customer circuit. Probes built by Iometrix then are connected to run the tests remotely.

For more news and information on carrier Ethernet, see xchange's eBook Ethernet Everywhere, sponsored by Zhone Technologies Inc.

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