Work continues on new standards aimed at a more multicarrier environment and mobile backhaul

The fast-growing carrier Ethernet equipment market is shifting in anticipation of a more multi­carrier environment for Ethernet services and in anticipation of burgeoning new areas such as mobile backhaul.

Mobile backhaul in particular is one of the hottest applications being chased by carrier Ethernet equipment vendors, but it has yet to really get off the ground in North America.

“We spoke with all the carriers about their backhaul,” said Tal Liani, analyst for Merrill Lynch, at a recent investor conference. “They all speak about the need to migrate to Ethernet, and there were some plans this way or another, but no one has concrete plans right now to migrate to Ethernet.”

Ethernet is being held back in these applications by a number of factors, some of which are carrier-specific. Among major North American mobile operators, Sprint previously had been the most proactive regarding Ethernet backhaul, but as the company navigates its own internal upheavals — including financial instability as well as a new CEO — it has dramatically curtailed spending and rethought some technology decisions.

Sprint found out the hard way how arduous it is to open up backhaul bandwidth for the coming wave of mobile traffic. This spring it blamed delays in its WiMAX rollout on the challenges of billing systems and backhaul. Sprint deploys fiber to cell towers, where it uses microwave backhaul technology from Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and FiberTower. It also uses circuit-bonding gear from Ceterus Networks that melds T-1s and T-3s together for high-bandwidth carrier Ethernet links that also can carry legacy traffic.

“Sprint was the only carrier to try Ethernet, and they went back to T-1s,” Liani said. “They told the cable carriers it costs them more money to manage Ethernet than it costs us to just work with a T-1.”

One factor slowing Ethernet’s adoption in mobile backhaul is the minority of cell sites in North America equipped with fiber. System vendors have been offering a range of different Ethernet-over-copper technologies in recent years to address this very issue, but rolling them out across the country will take time. According to research from Tpack and TranSwitch, only about 15% of new mobile backhaul installations last year were Ethernet, while T-1 technology accounted for 65%.

“I think it’s going to be a long time before there’s significant Ethernet growth there [in mobile backhaul networks],” said Tim Wiggins, chief financial officer for Tellabs, at the same investor conference. “In certain CDMA environments, there are Ethernet ports there. The problem is the carriers aren’t ready to accept the traffic on the other side.”

Still, once Ethernet backhaul takes hold, it’s expected to grow quickly. According to Infonetics Research, Ethernet microwave technology for mobile backhaul will be the fastest-growing metro Ethernet technology over the next five years. And metro Ethernet gear as a category is itself growing by leaps and bounds: Global sales grew 27% last year to $13 billion, Infonetics said, predicting double-digit growth to continue for at least the next four years.

Another area of carrier Ethernet technology getting increased attention is demarcation devices, which manage the handoff of Ethernet traffic from one network to another. These have long been important in delineating the difference between carrier networks and the LANS of their enterprise customers. But demarcation devices will be increasingly important in the nexus between carrier networks as carriers look to streamline the handoff of more sophisticated Ethernet networks.

This spring Adva Optical Networking began testing a new demarcation device designed to manage the interface between carrier networks. The vendor — ranked by Infonetics as the world’s top supplier of Ethernet access gear last year — said to think of its new FSP 150CM as two back-to-back versions of the demarcation gear it sells today for the handoffs between carriers and their enterprise customers. It has 16 slots, each capable of supporting 1 or 2 Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet links. The gear is based on two standards — the IEEE’s 802.1ag and the ITU’s y1731 — that, although not completely finalized as of this writing, are nearly ratified and therefore “implementable,” according to Fred Ellefson, vice president of global marketing for Adva.

In fact, the burgeoning market for Ethernet mobile backhaul is helping to accelerate this technology’s time to market. While wireline carriers might hand off dozens of services to reach out-of-territory branches of their enterprise customers, wireless operators might need hundreds or thousands of handoffs to serve their cell towers. With that kind of scale, wireless operators can dictate the handoff process en masse rather than negotiate individual interconnections. Therefore, they can configure this demarcation gear the way they want it, and carriers on the other end will comply. “If I’m an Ethernet carrier, I’ll bend over backward for that business,” Ellefson said.

This week Adva is expected to unveil a new demarcation device designed to manage Ethernet services over leased T-1s, E-1s or copper. It can bond up to eight T-1s for 12 Mb/s of capacity.

Although the market for bonded T-1s has been addressed by others — including Anda Networks, which is a partner of both Ciena and Nortel Networks — some regard the technology as having a short-term application, and many vendors recognize the need to also offer circuit-emulation gear using pseudowires as a way to continue aiding carrier migrations to Ethernet backhaul.

Meanwhile, work moves ahead on other industry standards efforts also aimed at simplifying multicarrier Ethernet services. Earlier this year the Metro Ethernet Forum approved a draft of its much-anticipated specification for external network-to-network interfaces, which is meant to help codify and streamline the process by which carriers hand off Ethernet services to one another. Nan Chen, president of the MEF, said this spring that he hopes to have the spec finalized by late this year or early next. But the process is slow in part because there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen. The last draft garnered more than 300 comments from stakeholders, Chen said.

Also this year, the MEF formed a new working group focused on creating a set of standard procedures for ordering Ethernet services on a wholesale basis. The new group’s aims point toward the long-sought goal of an environment in which Ethernet services can be ordered as predictably and reliably as T-1 services.

“Right now, when Verizon orders a T-1 from AT&T, they know exactly what to expect,” Chen said. “They don’t have to say much. The same thing needs to happen in Ethernet, but a lot of variables need to be ironed out first.”