The Metro Ethernet Forum this week is launching a program to fully define carrier-class Ethernet technology and implement a certification process to officially christen qualifying equipment with the group's new preferred term, “carrier Ethernet.”

“For four years, [the MEF] has been working to define what it means to be carrier-class,” said Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor. “The term ‘carrier Ethernet’ is now being applied to the accumulation of all that work. We're reaching a point where it makes sense to talk about it under this rubric.”

The MEF's definition of carrier Ethernet is comprised of five attributes. It includes end-to-end, 50-millisecond path protection and aggregated line and node protection. It has “hard” quality of service (QOS) features, enabling guaranteed end-to-end service level agreements for business, residential and mobile applications, including committed information rates and excess information rates. It offers seamless integration of legacy time-division multiplexing (TDM) traffic and supports existing voice applications and circuit emulation. It must allow for fast service creation; carrier-class operation, administration and maintenance capabilities; and customer network management. And it must be able to scale both bandwidth and services from megabits-per-second to tens of gigabits-per-second, with hundreds of thousands of Ethernet virtual circuits.

Those five attributes — protection, hard QOS, TDM support, service management and scalability — are expressed by conformance to 22 standards, nine of which have been ratified by the MEF, 10 of which are still being developed by the MEF (with expectations of being ratified in the next year or two), and three standards from outside the MEF: 802.1 and 802.1 ITU from the IEEE and the multiprotocol label switching fast re-route specification of the Internet Engineering Task Force.

“The idea here is to build enough solid foundation where the conformance and interoperability are becoming possible for carrier Ethernet,” said Nan Chen, MEF president and vice president of marketing for Ethernet equipment vendor Atrica. “We decided to come out with the overall framework for the industry to follow.”

The MEF's certification program will bestow the term carrier Ethernet to products that conform to those standards. But the MEF will not test and certify products directly. Rather, it will authorize third-party labs to do the work. About a month ago, Iometrix, which owns the first MEF-authorized lab, began testing the first batch of products for conformance to MEF 9, one of the standards defining scalability. The deadline for submissions to that first batch is June 9 for review by late in the third quarter or early in the fourth.

With widespread interoperability and compliance to standards, MEF members envision Ethernet traffic pushing far beyond the metro networks that gave the group its name only four years ago and into national and even global networks. “That's why we're choosing to call it ‘carrier Ethernet’ as opposed to metro Ethernet,” Metcalfe said. “Metro Ethernet is sort of a misnomer now.”

Infonetics Research is already predicting a $400-million global market for carrier Ethernet equipment, as the MEF defines it, rising to $2.6 billion by 2008. In particular, Chen referred to video-on-demand (VOD) as the “poster child” for carrier Ethernet, insisting that only Ethernet can provide the high bandwidth VOD requires.

“By this point, I think Ethernet is spoken more than any other language in the world, including Chinese,” Chen said. “Ninety-nine percent of the Internet end points are Ethernet. It would be really good to speak one language end to end throughout the entire nation, or the world.”