Dorothy's Scarecrow became a doctor of thinkology simply by being handed a certificate from the imaginary Universitartus Committiartum E Pluribus Unum.

Technology certification doesn't work that way. It takes proof. That's why Agilent Technologies announced last week — one day after the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) launched its certification program for carrier Ethernet services — the industry's first conformance test suite for MEF9, a new Metro Ethernet Forum test specification and the first to be officially ratified.

The MEF is a global industry alliance, 70 organizations strong, whose mission is to accelerate the worldwide adoption of carrier-class Ethernet networks and services through the development and implementation of carrier Ethernet technical specifications. The certification program is open to MEF members and may open to non-members down the road. Compliance testing will be done at Iometrix, an MEF-endorsed certification lab in San Francisco.

The MEF9 standard is key to metro Ethernet because it verifies service compliance at the user network interface. And test tools are key to verifying the MEF9 standard. With the MEF9 standard only recently ratified, Rick Pearson, marketing manager for Agilent's computing and networking solutions group, said the company is a pioneer in its ability to provide conformance testing for it.

The Agilent N2X N5590A MEF9 Conformance Test Suite incorporates hundreds of test cases for Ethernet private line and Ethernet local area network (LAN) services in order to verify compliance with the cornerstone MEF1 specification. The N5590A CTS saves test engineers several months of engineering effort that would otherwise be required to develop and maintain their own test applications. It also provides an independent validation tool that can resolve implementation problems in the network equipment instead of debugging the test setup. It speeds up the conformance testing process as well.

“Ethernet has got to get a lot smarter,” Pearson said. “The technology to do that is there, but the standard allows you to prove that you can use metro Ethernet as a private-line type of service or as a metro-LAN type of service.”

The compliance tester does not yet test at the services level, but it is just the first in a series of solutions for the standard. And service-based testing is where the industry is headed, Pearson said.

Both network equipment manufacturers and service providers can use the N2X for conformance and multi-vendor testing. “In the long run, equipment manufacturers will do multi-vendor testing, but service providers have to do multi-vendor testing,” Pearson said.

The results for those companies that submit their equipment for testing in the Iometrix lab by June 9 will be announced at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress in Berlin in September.

For network equipment manufacturers and service providers that already use N2X to verify the performance of their multiservice network equipment, it's simply a matter of loading the 300 test cases before they can begin to check conformance to MEF9. Agilent spent months programming the test cases, but users can run them automatically

A beta version is currently available, but for a peek behind the curtain of Agilent's conformance test suite, you can visit their booth at Supercomm in Chicago in June.