* The primary drivers behind Metro Ethernet adoption
In the last newsletter, we began a discussion of the current state-of-the-market for Metro Ethernet. This time we’ll focus on the primary drivers behind Metro Ethernet adoption, and why we see this as the “next big thing” in access services.
In the last newsletter, we began a discussion of the current state-of-the-market for Metro Ethernet. This time we’ll focus on the primary drivers behind Metro Ethernet adoption, and why we see this as the “next big thing” in access services.
According to the study, conducted by Kubernan and available at Webtorials, the primary driver is – no surprise here – a desire for lower cost for higher access speeds. Interestingly and somewhat paradoxically, this was seen as being more important by the service providers (80%) than by users (67%). As mentioned in the last newsletter, the users were much more interested in Metro Ethernet for simplified business continuity than the service providers anticipated, with relative percentages of 39% vs. 18%. As a related topic, and further confirming this, the option “Disaster recovery is better/easier” was chosen by 23% of the users vs. 12 % of the service providers.
Clearly, the message from these results is that users are willing to pay for the needed capabilities, indicating that this might not be as price-sensitive as one might think.
There were a couple of other surprises in the drivers. One of the perceived and often-touted advantages of Metro Ethernet is operational simplicity in that the staff can deal with a singular protocol. This was ranked fourth overall by the users at 27%, but the service providers thought it would be much more important, ranked third overall at 35%.
Finally, non-drivers are often interesting. One of the possible drivers listed as a choice was to avoid additional protocol conversions. The idea here is that by avoiding a requirement to go from Ethernet to another protocol (such as MPLS or ATM or Frame Relay) for WAN transport and back to Ethernet would provide a benefit. However, only 13% of users and 19% of service providers saw this as an advantage.
Next time we’ll look at the flip side – the primary inhibitors.
