The Metro Ethernet Forum today opened registration for service providers wishing to have their carrier Ethernet services certified as compliant to the group’s quality of service (QoS) specifications.

To earn certification, carriers’ services must pass a battery of 183 tests to ensure compliance to the Metro Ethernet Forum’s QoS specification, MEF14.

MEF14 measures service performance in terms of three main parameters: frame delay, frame delay variation and frame loss ratio (roughly analogous to delay, jitter and loss). And it measures three different types of services this way: Ethernet private line, Ethernet virtual private line and Ethernet local area network. The first two are point-to-point services, while the third one is point-to-multipoint.

The MEF hopes its newest certification program helps carriers offer hard service level agreements for their carrier Ethernet services, making end users ever more comfortable with Ethernet as a reliable service for mission-critical communication. The group also hopes it will help carriers to pass Ethernet services across different networks without fear of sacrificing service quality.

“I’d feel a lot more comfortable connecting my network to someone who has gone through the certification process,” said Michael Tighe, director of strategy and positioning for Verizon Business as well as chairman of the MEF.

At the Globalcomm trade show in June, the MEF awarded certifications to system vendors whose gear complied with the MEF14 specification for service quality. Fifteen vendors with a total of 40 systems received certificates.

And the MEF has previously certified carrier Ethernet services as complying with its service definitions. But until today, it had not yet begun the process of certifying services on the basis of QoS.