It is no longer appropriate to consider Carrier Ethernet standards, or the respective products on the market, immature. Of course there is still more work to be done here, however given the progress the MEF has shifted focus on the next phase of this problem — Global Interconnect. How can services be defined in a manner which is comparable amongst providers? How can two (or more) operators be interconnected to form an end-to-end service where neither of them have complete coverage? The customer-facing User Network Interface (UNI) has been standardized since 2005, and in January 2010 the MEF ratified the External Network-Network Interface (ENNI) specification, defining details for Carrier Ethernet service interconnection across network operators. The goal is to provide a common ground and understanding for services and their interfaces, improving interoperability of Carrier Ethernet across operators and customers. We set up this test program with exactly this goal: To validate and improve ENNI inter-working across network operators worldwide.
This white paper concludes the fourth phase of EANTC tests, the first of which kicked off the test program in January 2010. Since then, we have validated fourteen operators for a range of aspects of their Ethernet services including ENNI connectivity across Ethernet Exchanges and resiliency against link failures, evaluation of remote locations all across Europe and North America, MEF specified ENNI and Class of Service (CoS) mapping and the associated bandwidth profile expectations, and finally verifications of Ethernet OAM and performance monitoring. Previous reports can be found at www.eantc.de/cegi2010. In this phase we aimed to continue these topics where applicable, and tested multipoint-to-multipoint services in addition (E-LAN).
For the complete white paper, download the PDF.
