Metro Ethernet makes use of the technology of high bandwidth Carrier Ethernet which is employed in metropolitan area networks or MAN’s. The network is used primarily for accessing the Internet and for communicating between academic, business and local area systems belonging to the government.
There are three ways in which Carrier Ethernet is deployed. They are Conventional Ethernet, SDH or Synchronous Digital Hierarchy and MPLS or Multiprotocol Label Switching. Considered less expensive than the others, Conventional Ethernet is also difficult to expand or modify. SDH could be a better solution in areas covered by this infrastructure but these systems are not very flexible and may not provide adequate management of the bandwidth. MPLS offers this management but it is more expensive.
The Metro Ethernet may be used to connect private users, businesses and Local Area Networks to a Wide Area Network or to the Internet. Large conglomerates, government offices and academic establishments may connect to a campus or office via ME. ME in the star configuration, connects users with servers and other entities through cables or fiber optics.
The unprecedented demand for low cost metro service networks is welcome news for the providers of telecom services wishing to increase their revenues. Carrier Ethernet is being touted as the platform on which to build a low cost, high demand infrastructure with outstanding performance at a lower cost.
Ethernet service providers can tailor their offerings depending on the demands of their clients. Private lines, known as retail services, have been the traditional way of allocating Ethernet resources. The carrier may also sell a wholesale service, which would consist of a large pipe, to many smaller service suppliers who would then divide this up between their own clients.
Many customers will share infrastructure and equipment but this won’t really matter as each client receives his own dedicated circuit and the traffic is not bundled together. The service in this case is the sale of the pipes for which the client receives a negotiated SLA which will depend upon which circuit is purchased.
If multiplexing is used, every customers packets are multiplexed in a common pipe and there is no physical division of each clients information. The only divisions therefore, are logical ones accomplished by packet queuing. The service provider has the means to separate each customers data using a shared pipe, as well as being able to enforce the package details purchased by them.
The Ethernet was named by Robert Metcalfe, one of the development team, as far back as 1973. It is sometimes interesting to know something of the background to inventions which have changed our lives so dramatically. Metcalfe named it Ethernet after the ether which was thought to be the medium through which light traveled around the universe. The cabling, or ether, was the way that the information was carried around a network which was a sort of mini universe.
The Ethernet standard has become the protocol for carrying digital data traffic around a large percentage of the world’s data networks and the Metro Ethernet has grown and expanded from this major development that has become a most important standard.
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