Posted: 05th Mar, 2003 By: MarkJ
The prospect of operators such as BT switching to fibre based networks is still some way off, yet a new Telco-friendly Ethernet standard could help to speed things up:
A new telco-friendly version is emerging that will support third-party services, and offer high reliability at a fraction of the cost of existing networks.
New Ethernet standards and specifications are virtually complete, and will be finalised in August. "Service providers can do it now," said Nan Chen, president of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). The next area to adopt Ethernet will be metropolitan area (or "metro") networks, which span anywhere from a city to a region as big as some European countries. The MEF's E-Line and E-LAN standards -- currently being voted on -- will allow service providers to adopt Ethernet, said Chen.
There is plenty of bandwidth in the long-haul networks between population centres and in LANs, but still a shortage of bandwidth within the metro area. "The last decade has seen LAN capacity expand some 100-fold, and backbone capacity more like 300-fold, while the real bottleneck has been in the metropolitan area, with a bare 16-fold increase," said Chen.More @
ZDNet.