Carriers adding pizazz to Ethernet services

BellSouth next year plans to turn up metropolitan Ethernet offerings that support multiple service classes per port to enable more reliable voice and video transmission for business customers.

The company is but one of scores of carriers bulking up their Ethernet portfolios with class-of-service features, and scalable multipoint capabilities for voice and video support. Verizon, for example, recently said it plans to add three service classes to its switched Ethernet services, as well as other enhancements.

Carriers have good reason to do this: Ethernet service revenue, currently at $6 billion, is expected to hit $20 billion or better by 2008, according to research firms IDC and Infonetics.

BellSouth will ante up in the first half of 2006 with its Virtual Ethernet Service (VES), an MPLS-enabled offering that will support four classes of service assigned on a per-virtual LAN (VLAN) basis. The four service classes will be similar to what BellSouth now offers customers of its MPLS-based RFC 2547 Layer 3 VPN service: real time for voice, interactive for video, business critical and best effort.

"With VES, the concept is to take your traditional Ethernet private line or switched Ethernet service - which is really a port-based service where you have one class per port - and virtualize the port into a class-per-VLAN model," says Suzy Gray, BellSouth director of emerging data transport.

Analysts say virtualizing the Ethernet port could enable different types of service - such as frame relay - to be terminated on Ethernet, facilitating the migration from a legacy data service to a new one.

"That's an example of the kind of thing that these virtualized connections provide," says Thomas Nolle, president of consultancy CIMI. "You try to make a series of remote sites appear as though they are on an Ethernet LAN even though those sites are connected via some other type of service."

VES will be the basis of a Layer 2 metropolitan Ethernet service and an access option to the Layer 3 VPN service connecting metropolitan areas within BellSouth's nine-state region, Gray says. As an access option, VES will support multiple service classes per VLAN.

Users are anxious to try VES.

"We use [BellSouth's] existing Metro Ethernet solution to connect to remote workgroups" in clinics and primary care facilities, says Dave Dully, director of technology at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Fla. VES "would offer more flexibility in prioritizing the service for clinical applications and voice."

"We've got places right now where we can't put out VoIP because we can't get the QoS we need," says Mick Gunter, IT director at Blue Rhino, a propane tank exchange company in Winston-Salem, N.C. "I've been talking to BellSouth for probably two years-plus so it's exciting that the products are starting to actually come out on the marketplace."

Though VES will be MPLS-enabled, Gray stopped short of saying it will be based on Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS ), an increasingly popular IETF proposal for MPLS-based Layer 2 multipoint Ethernet services. BellSouth views VPLS as more beneficial between metropolitan areas rather than within them.