Cisco this week is extending its Carrier Ethernet portfolio with a system that allows service providers to deliver fiber-based Ethernet to multi-tenant units, such as apartment buildings.

Cisco also enhanced other Carrier Ethernet products to stretch 50ms resiliency from core to premise, increase scalability, and measure customer service-level agreements.

Cisco’s ME 3400 24FS Ethernet switch is an 8.8Gbps device that sports 24 100Mbps Fast Ethernet copper or fiber small form-factor pluggable (SFP) ports, and two Gigabit Ethernet SFP uplinks. Software features include quality of service, rate limiting, multicast control, security, 802.1Q Tunneling, Layer 2 Protocol Tunneling, IP routing, multi-VPN routing and policy-based routing.

The 3400 FS, along with other switches in the Cisco Carrier Ethernet portfolio, also supports the 50ms SONET/SDH resiliency feature. This software upgrade is intended to bring SONET/SDH SLAs to Ethernet, in either ring or mesh topologies, via Cisco’s Resilient Ethernet Protocol technology.

Another enhancement is the so-called embedded event manager. This feature is designed to automate proactive network troubleshooting of Carrier Ethernet deployments. It is a software enhancement that enables service providers to have the network self-monitor and self-correct in order reduce service outages, Cisco says.

Cisco also announced its IPTV SLA for video traversing Ethernet networks via IP multicast. The IPTV SLA software enhancement is intended to enable providers to look inside the MPEG packet to determine if a video problem is due to video encoding or a network transmission issue.

The IPTV SLA is designed to identify which channels, multicast groups and number of subscribers are affected by a problem, and its location in the network.

The ME 3400 FS is available now. Prices start at $2,495.