Cisco pushing gear for Ethernet services

Cisco is getting ready to sell more gear in the burgeoning market for Ethernet services from carriers, as the company last week introduced new switches and hardware modules at the Telecom 05 show in Las Vegas.

Corporations are snapping up Ethernet services because IT departments understand the technology from years of experience building and managing LANs, analysts say. Extending it to the WAN simplifies matters and lets them add bandwidth in any increment they want without installing a new WAN router interface, says Michael Howard, a principal analyst at Infonetics Research.

The new Cisco products serve two main purposes: delivering Ethernet packets directly to offices and residences, and aggregating traffic from edge access devices into the carrier's network.

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Cisco is getting ready to sell more gear in the burgeoning market for Ethernet services from carriers, as the company last week introduced new switches and hardware modules at the Telecom 05 show in Las Vegas.

Corporations are snapping up Ethernet services because IT departments understand the technology from years of experience building and managing LANs, analysts say. Extending it to the WAN simplifies matters and lets them add bandwidth in any increment they want without installing a new WAN router interface, says Michael Howard, a principal analyst at Infonetics Research.

The new Cisco products serve two main purposes: delivering Ethernet packets directly to offices and residences, and aggregating traffic from edge access devices into the carrier's network.

The Cisco ME 3400 Series Ethernet Access Switches are 24-port devices designed for Carrier Ethernet. They are designed to reside in the basement of a small multi-tenant residential or office building, or in a facility that would serve a small neighborhood. Equipped with 10/100M bit/sec ports, the switches are intended to deliver exponentially higher bandwidth to customers than typical DSL or leased T-1 offerings bring today. They feature two optical fiber uplinks to connect into a carrier infrastructure, such as fiber to the premises or fiber to the node, says Brendan Gibbs, director of product management for Cisco's Broadband Edge & Midrange Routing Business Unit.

Each port on an ME 3400 is intended for just one subscriber, and the switches have port-level security, a feature that prevents any user from seeing packets intended for users hooked up to other ports. This is different from the typical use of an access switch in a company, where traffic among members of a workgroup is exchanged via the access switch, Gibbs says.

Vendors have been trying to sell Ethernet gear to carriers for a long time, but only in the past two or three years have they come out with products that can deliver services as steadily as service providers need, analysts say. Compared with enterprise LAN equipment, carrier gear needs more redundancy and has to be able to support specific service-level agreements.

"Some people thought they could just take their enterprise switch and remarket it as a carrier solution, and that doesn't work," says Ray Mota, an analyst at Synergy Research Group.

A major step in getting Ethernet equipment to meet carrier expectations was the development of specifications by the Metro Ethernet Forum, a group of service providers and vendors, analysts says. The group is now testing products and certifying that key functions work according to its standards.

One of those key functions is virtual private LAN service (VPLS), a technology widely used to emulate the guaranteed performance that MPLS makes possible in the core of a carrier network. Though some large corporations have been able to set up MPLS, the Ethernet-based VPLS is much easier to work with, Infonetics' Howard says.

Cisco's products can support VPLS, as well as other services, according to Gibbs.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.