* Metropolitan-area networks return with sophistication
A few years ago, we were bombarded with articles announcing a new generation of high-speed metropolitan-area network services based on Ethernet. In our industry the hype surrounding new products and services usually precedes the reality by several years. That certainly has happened in the case of Ethernet MANs where we are only now beginning to see a significant deployment of such services.
One of the factors that limited the success of the MAN services of a few years ago is that they were based on an enterprise version of Ethernet. Over the last few years, we have begun to see the development of a carrier class version of Ethernet that is more appropriate for supporting service provider offerings https://www.webtorials.com/abstracts/Metrobility6.htm
Based on this evolution of Ethernet, the MAN services that will be deployed over the next few years will be more sophisticated than their predecessors. Organizations that are evaluating MAN services should ask the usual questions about coverage, pricing and the availability of features such as bandwidth on demand. These organizations should also dig deeper to understand the service provider’s MAN architecture. A key area to explore is OAM – operations, administration and maintenance. The IEEE 802.ah working group has recently added a number of features that improve the robustness of Ethernet services. Another area to explore is whether or not the service provider intends to extend MPLS to the customer premise. Extending MPLS to the customer premise allows service providers to more easily offer common QoS capabilities on an end-to-end basis.
