Carrier Ethernet services give Canada’s enterprises competitive edge

Carrier Ethernet services are becoming increasingly popular: less expensive to install, easy for carriers to lay down a 100-megabit interface to sell bandwidth on demand. And Canada is actually ahead of the US. This puts a lot of options in front of the customer. Which one is right for you? Guelph, ON-based home builder Fusion Homes needed a better way to network its headquarters and five sales offices across southwestern Ontario. Each branch office depended on its own network server and DSL connection to the internet. The DSL upload speeds were slow, says Matt Crape, Fusion’s systems administrator, and keeping the remote servers functioning was a constant headache. Employees at the branch offices would come in early in the morning, only to find their server was down and there was nobody available to fix it. What the company needed was a single network linking all the offices to a central server that provided higher-speed internet access. Fusion got that by switching to Transparent LAN service provided by Atria Networks LP, a Markham, ON-based carrier that offers business networking in towns and cities across southern Ontario. Atria links Fusion Homes’ sales offices in London, Guelph, Kitchener and Tillsonburg to the main office with optical fibre, which is much faster than the previous DSL service. It also creates the impression that all the branch offices are connected to a single Ethernet network. What does that mean? “Simplicity,” Crape says. “Less things to deal with.” Fusion hosts its own e-mail system and applications for purposes like centralized scheduling. Connections are now more reliable, and when there are problems, Atria provides 24-hour support – something a small company like Fusion could not do internally. Crape says company employees don’t see any difference except that network traffic moves faster. “Everything’s as simple as e-mail,” he says. A new networking standard Carrier Ethernet services like Atria’s have become increasingly popular over the past few years, according to Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst at Infonetics Research in Campbell, CA, which specializes in data networking and telecommunications. That’s because Ethernet has become the networking standard, it’s less expensive to install than the alternatives, and it’s easy for carriers to install a 100-megabit interface at the customer site once and then sell whatever increment of bandwidth the customer needs. That means cost savings for the customer. “Typically Ethernet services are 20% or 30% less than similar services for private lines,” says Howard. “There’s a transition cost, but basically going to Ethernet is a long-term saving.” That’s especially attractive in today’s tough economic climate, he notes. Then there’s the simplicity of end-to-end Ethernet. “The big advantage is seamless connectivity,” says James Levy, director of IP access solutions for the business networks team at Telus Corp in Burnaby, BC. Also, because Ethernet is such a widely accepted standard, there’s a wide range of equipment available that works with it, so customers can choose equipment from multiple vendors, says John Piercy, chief executive at Atria Networks. And the skills needed to manage Ethernet networks are easier to find than those required for other types of wide-area connections. While technology directions often become clear in the United States a few months before they are evident in Canada, in the case of carrier Ethernet services the shoe is on the other foot. Canadian carriers actually started launching Ethernet services before their American counterparts did, Levy says. As the dominance of Frame Relay technology faded, US carriers moved initially to native Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) connections, Levy says, while Canadian carriers like Telus went instead with LAN extension technology with ATM hidden in the background. That wasn’t necessarily because Telus and its domestic competitors saw that Ethernet was the way of the future in the wide-area network. Like many differences between the US and Canadian telecommunications markets, it had more to do with Canada’s larger geographic area and smaller population. “I would suggest it actually was a by-product of lack of scale in the Canadian market,” Levy says. US cities had enough density of business customers that the carriers could write viable business cases for offering ATM services close to the customer. “In the Canadian context I don’t believe any carrier pushed their ATM out beyond the core.” So Ethernet became the interface to the customer. Customer demands might have had something to do with it too. “Canada was a little ahead of the US in demanding those services,” says Eric Fletcher, senior vice-president of marketing at Winnipeg-based MTS Allstream Inc, which launched an Ethernet service called transparent LAN several years ago and is now moving to a second-generation offering it calls switched Ethernet. Canada’s utility telecom companies – offshoots of metropolitan electrical utilities that took advantage of their parents’ rights-of-way to run fibre networks in major cities – also played a role in developing carrier Ethernet. Atria, for instance, was formed in 2005 by the merger of Guelph FibreWired and Kitchener, ON-based FibreTech Telecommunications, both of which were owned by local electrical utilities. It grew through acquisitions including that of Telecom Ottawa, a Hydro Ottawa spinoff. Like most utility telcos, Atria built its business on offering LAN connection services, particularly to municipal agencies, education and health-care institutions – what is sometimes called the MUSH (for Municipalitiies, Universities, School and Hospitals). The MUSH sector is a natural for Ethernet services because of the need to link multiple locations. Piercy says its bandwidth needs continue to grow, with schools for instance doing more videoconferencing and distance learning. MUSH still accounts for about 50% of Atria’s business, Piercy says, but there is also a growing private-sector segment. Private-sector customers have some additional needs – for instance, a requirement that publicly traded companies be set up so that they can continue to operate if their primary server goes down. That’s a good fit with Ethernet services that can link users to servers at different locations as if they were on a single LAN. Carrier Ethernet services are quite widely adopted in large Canadian enterprises today and are growing in the small and medium business sector, Levy says, adding that over all, the market is growing in the double digits. Different spokes for different folks Carrier Ethernet services can take different forms. A carrier may provide a direct connection between a customer’s Ethernet router and its own MPLS services, with the carrier routing the customer’s traffic through its network. An organization may want to control its own routing in order to prioritize different types of traffic. To meet that need, carriers can connect customer Ethernet routers point-to-point over the carrier network while leaving the routing to the customer’s routers. To the router on the edges of one customer LAN, it appears as if it is talking to another Ethernet router at the other customer location. Or carriers can provide multipoint connections so the customer can link from three sites to dozens while still handling its own routing. Which of these options is the right choice depends on the customer. Fletcher at Allstream says his company’s point-to-point and point-to-multipoint services are aimed at those that want to control their own routing. Levy says Telus provides that type of service for customers that want to manage routing themselves, but also the Ethernet-over-MPLS flavour for those that don’t. “We have customers that self-manage their routing and we have customers that have Telus manage their routing,” he says. “Some businesses have very well established IT departments that have the capacity to manage the routing themselves, and we respect their quality of service markings.” Piercy says Atria is in the process of upgrading its network to offer customers more control over their network routing, with full control available in some markets now. The company also plans to start offering voice, video and other applications, he adds. To help businesses evaluate carrier Ethernet services – and to help the carriers evaluate the equipment they use to provide those services – a group called the Metro Ethernet Forum has created a set of standards. The MEF certification program – based on independent tests by San Francisco-based test lab Iometrix Inc – evaluates services and equipment against MEF standards for Ethernet services and traffic management. In July, Bell Canada announced that it had become the first Canadian carrier to receive both of the MEF certifications designed for service providers. From a standing start in the LAN in the early 1980s, Ethernet has taken over more and more networking territory, and that looks like it will continue. “It’s going to be driven by speed,” says Piercy. Demand for one-gigabit fibre links continues to increase, he says, and “I wouldn’t be surprised to see 10-gigabit service start to grow.”

Carrier Ethernet services give Canada’s enterprises competitive edge

News | 09/09/2009 2:59 pm EDT

To keep reading, get a free trial.

Already a Subscriber?

Reuse & Permissions

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us