WAN Services /

Much to weigh with metro Ethernet services

By Lisa Pierce
Network World, 12/10/01

Businesses interested in becoming early adopters of metropolitan and long-haul Ethernet services should consider the following criteria when evaluating providers:

Ownership of the enterprise customer: Incumbent local exchange carriers (ILEC) XO Communications, GiantLoop Network and Yipes serve business customers, while providers such as Telseon cater to service providers. Others including Cogent Communications specialize in serving niches such as multitenant units.

Ownership of the fiber: ILECs and large competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC) own their networks. Most providers that only offer Ethernet services don't.

Resiliency of the infrastructure: Some providers provision service on redundant rings with standby service. Others provision service on a single strand, with no failover protection.

Some carriers' network management capabilities prevent over-subscription while others are not as sophisticated and may experience congestion.

Performance warranties: Preliminary service-level agreements and service-level objectives exist, but metrics vary sharply by provider.

Three distinct types of service have emerged:

Services aimed at the companies, typically offered as managed Layer 3 VPN services and include tunneling, encryption and firewalls.

Services targeted at the service provider and carrier market provide true Layer 2 Ethernet capabilities, and like their enterprise services cousins, are proprietary services managed on an end-to-end basis.

At the very high end, transport-centric wavelength services targeted at carriers, value-added service providers and ultralarge companies provide pure, point-to-point bandwidth (OC-12, OC-48 and OC-192).

With the exception of XO, most CLECs offer service in the top 20 or fewer markets. XO's 10M and 100M bit/sec services are available in all 64 of its markets, but its Gigabit Ethernet service is only available in the top 15 cities it serves.

Many of these services are confined to connecting sites within a single city. However, XO, Yipes and Broadwing (through its relationship with Telseon) recently announced long-haul Layer 2 and Layer 3 services. Sprint is the first tier-one interexchange carrier to announce a long-haul wavelength service.

Providers that focus on serving enterprise customers typically offer a variety of services. In contrast, many new providers only offer Ethernet and/or wavelength service.

Most of the providers that focus on serving companies are publicly held - the one exception is Yipes, which has raised $219 million in three rounds of financing. In contrast, many of the providers that serve carriers and service providers are privately held; notable exceptions include Neon, Metromedia Fiber Network and XO.

The financial sector, and thus New York, is a critical market for all providers that offer these services. The events of Sept. 11 will likely strain the financial resources of several new metro Ethernet and wavelength providers and will spur early industry consolidation.

Even though Ethernet is a worldwide standard for LANs, all existing metro Ethernet services are managed by providers on an end-to-end basis and include the routers or cards to interconnect the LAN and metropolitan-area network (MAN). Customers have no choice of vendor equipment, and multicarrier connectivity is only achieved through provider business relationships.

One of the stated goals of the recently formed Metropolitan Ethernet Forum is to specify the necessary interfaces to support interprovider Ethernet MAN transparency, but the forum has just begun, making it too soon to speculate on a timetable for the implementation of a future specification.

Pierce is a research fellow at Giga Information Group. She can be reached at lpierce@gigaweb.com.

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