Service Providers are challenged by the radical shift in service revenue and technology that has occurred in the last two decades. In order to grow top line revenue, they have organized around business opportunities in managed services (VPN, VPLS), connection-oriented services (i.e., VoIP and video over IP), IPTV, Internet and wholesale services. These services are layered over different physical infrastructures with varying constraints. Service providers would like to do top level construction of new services and be able to reuse components. For this to occur applications need to utilize a common physical infrastructure and service providers need to be able to offer network virtualization into each of these areas. And of course, economics are always of paramount concern.
In order to meet these challenges, the response has been to leverage a well known relatively low cost base technology and add in only the capabilities required for network virtualization and effective service creation and delivery. Derived from Ethernet and by adding OAM&P, Carrier Ethernet provides circuit-like behavior to the data plane, allowing these capabilities to also be extremely useful in the Enterprise market. And, by adding only the components required for network virtualization and no specialized hardware, Ethernet economics are maintained.
Carrier Ethernet is an opportunity for service providers to position their services to their greatest advantage. To the retail customer, Ethernet is a convenient, familiar and cost-effective packet-transport technology. To the carrier serving that customer, Carrier Ethernet is an opportunity to offer a simple and useful baseline upon which tiers of value-added services, ranging from IP-services to VoIP, can be built. When coupled with Next-Generation Network (NGN) architectures, Carrier Ethernet has the potential to drive innovative new business and operational models for carrier and enterprise networks.
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