* Wrapping up discussion of primary inhibitors for Metro Ethernet
Today, we’ll wrap up the discussion of primary inhibitors for Metro Ethernet adoption. Last time around, we mentioned that the two primary inhibitors from the user perspective are high service prices and managing/troubleshooting.
Interestingly, the users and service providers are very sharply divided here. Users are concerned about price, while service providers’ top two perceived concerns are reliability (cited by 55%) and managing/troubleshooting (cited by 48%). From the user perspective, reliability came in third, being cited by 32% of the respondents.
Users were much less concerned about security than the service providers thought they would be. In fact, only 31% of the users cited security as a major inhibitor compared to 40% of the service providers. An equal number of users had a problem with high equipment prices (31%), while only 18% of the service providers thought this was a major problem.
For most of the above questions, it appeared that the users are a bit more laid back about the inhibitors than are the service providers. However, some of the more major inhibitors from the users came in the form of the service not being needed (21% of users vs. 11 % of service providers) and “other” concerns (again 21% of users and 8% of service providers.
For those of us who have been in the WAN field for many years perhaps one of the most surprising results was the lowest ranking inhibitor. Literally for decades, bandwidth efficiency has been a major concern – trying to make every bit-per-second into useful capacity. But the table seems to have turned on this one. Only 8% of both the users and the service providers interviewed saw “high packet overhead” as an inhibitor.
As a reminder, this report by Kubernan is available at Webtorials.
