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Lessons Learned
The road to establishing Optical Ethernet in the Metro network has been a long one. Here are a few of the lessons that the industry has learned along the way.
- Ethernet has outpaced other broadband offerings such as Frame Relay and ATM when it comes to speed-data rates for Ethernet are currently at 10 Gb/sec with 100 Gb/sec expected in the not too far behind.
- Ethernet costs much less than SONET-the street price for a lowspeed OC-3 to OC 12 interface is $5,000 to $15,000 compared to the less than $200 it costs for a 100 Mb/sec Ethernet interface.
- Much of the technology needed to support future implementations of Optical Ethernet in the Metro network has already been deployed.
- Networking has shifted from a voice-oriented, circuit-based scheme to data-intensive, packet-based switching.
- Ethernet dominates in corporate and home networks as well as in the back offices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the massive server farms that support applications for Application Service Providers (ASPs).
- Early implementations of Ethernet in the Metro network were not successful because they were simply an extension of Ethernet and came with a slew of problems, not the least of which were severe distance limitations.
- Ethernet and SONET share many of the same elements, so lessons learned from implementing SONET can be applied to Ethernet.
- High overhead has all but killed competitive broadband offerings such as Frame Relay and ATM.
- By deploying Optical Ethernet providers will see a reduction in equipment, deployment and management costs.
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Meet the Leaders of
Optical Ethernet.