The Metro Ethernet Forum began the next phase in its year-old carrier Ethernet certification program today by commencing testing equipment for quality of service characteristics.

Equipment vendors can now submit their gear for compliance to MEF14, a series of tests ratified last month and designed to verify compliance to MEF10, the specification that defines carrier Ethernet QOS attributes. MEF14-compliant equipment would allow service providers a common method for offering service level agreements (SLAs) for Ethernet services.

To be included in the first batch of MEF14 certifications, which the MEF will announce at the Globalcomm trade show in June, equipment vendors can submit products for testing through the end of March.

"It's when we started offering strong SLAs that was one of the keys that unlocked the growth to the Ethernet market," said Mike Tighe, Verizon Communications' director of corporate strategy and a member of the MEF's board of directors.

MEF14 focuses on two main areas of traffic management: service performance and bandwidth profile rate enforcement. Service performance is measured in terms of three main parameters: frame delay, frame delay variation and frame loss ratio (roughly analogous to delay, jitter and loss). Bandwidth profile rate enforcement allows service providers to assign various priorities to different Ethernet services--for example, giving preferential treatment to voice or video services over Internet access services during periods of network congestion.

When asked when the MEF's certification program would include operations, administration and management (OAM) specifications, MEF President Nan Chen said, "Rest assured we're working on that as well in conjunction with some other standards organizations. OAM is certainly on our radar screen. We probably have to wait a little bit to see where the industry's converging on that."

The MEF's certification program defines carrier Ethernet with five basic characteristics: scalability, reliability, service management, TDM support and what the group calls "hard QOS," which is tested through MEF14. Last September, the MEF issued its first batch of equipment certifications, declaring 39 products compliant with the scalability requirements set forth in MEF9. A month later, the group announced plans to certify Ethernet services. Today the MEF said it will issue its first batch of Ethernet service certifications in April.