Can carrier Ethernet answer the call for bigger bandwidth?

NEW YORK -- If you’re a business struggling with a slow, unreliable network connection, then the Metro Ethernet Forum wants to provide you with salvation.

In their quest to preach the gospel of carrier Ethernet to the unconnected masses, the Metro Ethernet Forum kicked off its world tour in New York yesterday by outlining carrier Ethernet’s business benefits, its return on investment and its global availability. The event, which was cosponsored by Network World, also acted as a venue for companies such as Anda Networks, Nortel and VSNL International to showcase their carrier Ethernet services.

“The goal of our world tour is to evangelize the value of Ethernet to enterprise,” said MEF President Nan Chen, who is also the vice president of product management and marketing for Strix Systems. “The driver for Ethernet service is the large bandwidth demand and quality of services that enterprise is going to need in the coming years.

The seminar featured a keynote address from Don Tapscott, the CEO of the New Paradigms think tank and the coauthor of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

During his address, Tapscott argued that the continued improvement in Web technology in the coming years will require an enormous increase in bandwidth that can only be met by heavy use of carrier Ethernet. In particular, he pointed to the emergence of Web 2.0, which tries to use “billions of smart, communicating” mobile Internet devices and will require “pervasive broadband.

“This ain’t your daddy’s Internet,” he said. “Imagine a world of trillions of inert objects talking to each other, talking to us and enabling us to talk to each other differently.”

Tapscott also argued that as many younger people come into the workforce, they will demand an increasing amount of bandwidth that would “change the way we innovate and produce things” and would create an economy where “value creation has moved onto the network.” Tapscott concluded his address by challenging carriers and enterprises to rise to the challenge of providing quality service to “a new generation of people for whom bandwidth is their birthright.”

During one panel on carrier Ethernet’s business services, Ray Patalano, enterprise marketing manager of the Ciena Corp., predicted that carrier Ethernet would make networks more efficient by streamlining all their services and taking away needless complexities.

“If you looked at enterprise networks in the past, they were very simple,” Patalano said. “As we move into things like carrier Ethernet, the push is for things to get very simple again. I believe this is the technology that will make networks very simple again, and simplicity will be the strength of the networks.”

In addition to outlining the potential benefits of carrier Ethernet, many representatives from carriers shared their views about developing trends within the Ethernet market. Mike Volgende, Verizon’s marketing director of Ethernet service, said that he expected to see more carrier Ethernet services tailored toward individual businesses, such as networks that are specifically designed to allow hospitals to share high-resolution medical images. Meanwhile, Kevin Curran, the senior vice president of marketing for Optimum Lightpath, predicted that more businesses would replace their old copper wiring with fiber optics as demand for higher bandwidth increased.