In the 11 years that the MEF has been developing technical specifications, promoting the adoption of Carrier Ethernet and certifying Carrier Ethernet services, the industry has grown from almost zero to a $40 billion market.
Earlier this year the MEF ushered in the next generation of standardized, Carrier Ethernet services - now known as "CE2.0". After developing over 30 technical specifications and agreements, covering areas such as service definitions and attributes, SOAM, CoS and MBH, the MEF decided to present this work to the market as CE2.0.
CE2.0 is an umbrella term for a wide range of related MEF work that enables application-aware SLAs with the industry's first standardized multi-CoS performance objectives, interoperability between service providers and manageability of multi-provider networks and new Ethernet access services. Prior to CE 2.0, there were just three standardized Carrier Ethernet services (EPL, EVPL and E-LAN) that could be certified for functionality and performance (MEF 9 and MEF 14 respectively). The latter is now considered the first generation of Carrier Ethernet - in other words, CE 1.0.
In contrast to the first generation of Carrier Ethernet, CE2.0 makes eight standardized Carrier Ethernet services available for implementation and certification. These eight form the basis for a wide range of advanced applications for Carrier Ethernet in many industry verticals.
Business communications - in finance, health, government, education and manufacturing for example - will increasingly rely on the point-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint high bandwidth, low latency, application-aware, regional-global capabilities of CE2.0 services. Similarly, rapidly growing mobile data networks will become increasingly dependent on the low cost per bit and class of service features provided by CE2.0 services and MEF mobile backhaul implementation agreements.
Of course, the inexorable shift to cloud-based services - whether applications for businesses, software as a service, content distribution or online commerce - is also being accelerated by the availability of standardized layer 2 CE2.0 services that include support for rooted multipoint-to-multipoint topologies and access services.