What I learned at Carrier Ethernet World Asia in Kuala Lumpur this week:
Turn off your SDH
That was the message from Juniper Networks and NSN, co-presenting under their new (if clunky) JV moniker, Carrier Ethernet Solutions BV. Andrew Coward, Juniper’s service provider marketing VP, said telcos are faced with the prospect of being relegated to dumb pipes at a time when incremental services on top of the network will be growing 20% CAGR over the next five years.
“That will happen on your network whether you do it or someone else does it,” Coward said, insisting that the most cost-effective way to get there is to lower the cost of the network – with the ultimate goal of going fully packetized and turning off the legacy SDH network forever (though an NSN employee told your reporter later that it’s probably going to be another ten years minimum before carriers actually start doing that).
Ethernet’s next trick: E-NNI and OAM
A number of speakers brought up the need for the E-NNI. standard to facilitate easier global rollouts of Carrier Ethernet services. Metro Ethernet Forum COO Kevin Vachon said the E-NNI standard is set for a vote and will be ready in Q1.
The next big standards are for service OAM, which Rotem Salomonvitch (country co-chair Australia/NZ for the MEF and IP solutions director for AlcaLu) described as “the biggest hurdle” for Carrier Ethernet. “Put bluntly, it’s a way to assign blame when something goes wrong – is it my fault or my partner’s fault?”
MEF standards for S-OAM performance management and fault management are due in 3Q10 and 1Q11, respectively.