The one-time enterprise technology is becoming a dominant force in telecom.

Ethernet technology has been waging a steady, unstoppable infiltration of telecom networks for years, growing more advanced and pervasive all the while. And this year is exemplary of the trend. Once distrusted by telecom’s circuit-switching community, Ethernet is undoubtedly one of the biggest stars on the carpet at this year’s NXTcomm.

Show attendees may notice a few trends among the new Ethernet gear unveiled on the exhibit floor: the race to boost capacity, advances in the reach and robustness of carrier Ethernet technology and a new wave of debate about the best mix of Layer 2 and Layer 3 technologies in the network. One subject that may now be beyond debate, however, is the unavoidable importance of Ethernet in telecom networks.

“Virtually all the data that leaves any machine in the world now is in Ethernet frames,” said Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent Communications. “And all the traffic growth is coming from the Internet. As you build a business model, you need to build it using Ethernet as the interface and have a connection strategy to the public Internet.”

Following a year of insatiable growth by video Internet players such as YouTube, one of the common themes among new Ethernet equipment on display at NXTcomm is a move toward increased capacity. For example, Redback Networks is trumpeting capacity increases in the newest member of its SmartEdge family of multiservice edge (MSE) routers, which are being unveiled at the show. A 480 Gb/s platform, the new quarter-rack 1200, is the same size but double the capacity of Redback’s previously largest MSE router, the SmartEdge 800. And with the ability to handle 512,000 VLANs, the new gear is an eightfold improvement over Redback’s previous gear.

Occam Networks is unveiling a new blade for its BLC 6000 broadband loop carrier platform that ratchets up the speed of its Ethernet aggregation gear from 1 Gb/s to 10 GbE. With the ability to pool up to 16 access rings and handle up to 32,000 Media Access Control, or MAC, addresses (for identifying end user devices), the new BLC 6450 blade represents an eightfold increase in scale for the Occam line. “Being able to scale is important,” said Russ Sharer, Occam’s vice president of marketing. “We’ve gone from every user having a phone to every user having a phone, three or four set-top boxes and three or four PCs.”

The power of Ethernet as a cost-efficient aggregator in edge networks may have been best illustrated in recent years by Alcatel, which has used a combination of Ethernet aggregation and IP/MPLS edge routing to make a reputable name for itself in the edge space in a relatively short amount of time. That success came to some extent at the expense of Juniper Networks, which was widely criticized for not capitalizing on Ethernet’s growing influence with strong Layer 2 gear of its own. Lesson learned (never underestimate the power of Ethernet), Juniper unveiled last fall and made available earlier this year its most Ethernet-centric product yet, the MX960. It is expected to be on display this week. Attendees may be eager to determine with their own eyes whether the 480 Gb/s core router lives up to its promise. When Juniper publicly announced its creation last fall, the company’s CEO Scott Kriens audaciously declared, “The 960 is far more than just our participation in the carrier Ethernet market segment. I think it’s going to be the end of the carrier Ethernet market segment.”

As carrier Ethernet penetrates edge networks, it’s also infiltrating metro copper in a variety of forms. Some of the most prominent Ethernet-over-copper equipment vendors, Actelis Networks and Hatteras Networks, are trumpeting recent customer wins at the show. Whereas Turin Networks is showing off the T-1 bonding gear it introduced a month ago.

Meanwhile, the quality of carrier Ethernet equipment and services is improving markedly. At NXTcomm, the Metro Ethernet Forum is naming the first batch of service providers to have met the requirements of the MEF’s quality of service (QOS) certification program. Following a similar program for equipment, the MEF’s service provider QOS program, begun last fall, certifies services that have passed a battery of 183 tests on the basis of their frame delay, frame delay variation and frame loss ratio (essentially the MEF’s version of delay, jitter and loss).

New equipment at the show also evinces Ethernet’s growing sophistication, particularly as vendors blend Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality in different ways. “We’re starting to see Layer 3 and Layer 2 devices become very close in terms of density, cost and features,” said Arpit Joshipura, vice president of product management for Redback. “We’re seeing a lot of Ethernet switches being subsumed directly into devices like the SmartEdge.”

Software in Redback’s new 1200 takes on three new functions often performed by small discrete network appliances: session border control, peer-to-peer traffic management and security. And it includes software-based data mobility functions, managing mobile data sessions for a range of different wireless technologies and doing work that might otherwise require additional application gateways. “You’ll simplify network deployment by not having so many purpose-built pizza boxes in the network,” Joshipura said.

The latest release of Adva Optical Networking’s WDM platform, on display at NXTcomm, includes new Layer 2 features to support Ethernet-based services such as IPTV, video on demand and other residential broadband offerings. The eighth release of the Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 3000 will aggregate multiple Gigabit Ethernet links into 10 Gb/s wavelengths, with GbE add/drop multiplexing (ADM) to aid GbE service deployment. It also includes standards-based Ethernet performance monitoring as well as operations, administration and maintenance.

Equipment vendors have also made strides lately in adapting packet-based Ethernet to connection-oriented environments, imbuing it with performance capabilities analogous to those of circuit-switched networks. Meriton Networks, Nortel Networks and Siemens and have led the charge to promote provider backbone transport (PBT) technology as a connection-oriented Ethernet network technology, using added address tags to transport Ethernet services through “tunnels” of reserved bandwidth. At NXTcomm, another major vendor will take a swing at the concept.

Fujitsu Network Communications is showcasing its recently unveiled packet optical networking platform, the Flashwave 9500. The Flashwave 9500 is a single chassis designed to do the work of Ethernet switches, next-generation ADMs and reconfigurable optical ADMs. The system uses MPLS-based pseudowires (PWs) to encapsulate Ethernet packets for connection-oriented, point-to-point transport. That method grants Ethernet a range of carrier-class characteristics, including bandwidth reservation, 50-millisecond protection, sectionalized fault management and multiple classes of service.

Though PBT is touted as a simpler alternative to MPLS, PWs or another approach, Transport-MPLS, Fujitsu believes all three are comparably complex. The vendor is initially focusing its 9500 on support of MPLS PWs because that technology is the most mature of the three in terms of industry standards development, said Sam Lisle, market development director for Fujitsu. Over the long run, he said, “One of the big proponents of PBT [British Telecom] is a Fujitsu customer. We’ll do whatever it takes to make them happy.”

Of course, for carrier Ethernet equipment vendors in general, making customers happy will entail not just boosting capacity and performance in the newest gear. As much as anything, it will involve delivering to carriers one of the central promises of Ethernet: a lower cost structure.

As Cogent’s Schaeffer peruses the many booths on the exhibit floor at NXTcomm, gear that offers cost-saving interfaces between Layer 2 and Layer 3 functions will hold his interest longer than those touting added features. Cogent’s network, built largely on Cisco Systems gear, is IP over DWDM at its core with Ethernet interfaces at the edge. The company mainly provides high-speed Internet access to business customers, over-provisioning network capacity as a means to ensure service quality. It uses MPLS to a limited degree for traffic management, but Schaeffer won’t be shopping all of the aisles at NXTcomm for new MPLS-enabled features.