Ethernet is mature, say carriers; Ethernet tunnels gaining acceptance

A new study of 27 top tier service providers in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific (average 2007 revenue of $18 billion) provides further evidence that Ethernet continues to go mainstream and will eventually dominate the metro space, as SONET/SDH slowly declines over the next 10 to 20 years.

Every service provider interviewed in the Infonetics Research study, "Service Provider Plans for Metro Optical and Ethernet," already offers Ethernet services, and their metro Ethernet service revenue is growing fast.

"The most telling finding in the study is that the vast majority of service providers we interviewed have a strategy for using Ethernet instead of SONET/SDH for accessing and collecting customer traffic," says Michael Howard, principal analyst of Infonetics Research and lead author of the study. "Ethernet as a carrier class technology has made considerable progress; almost 90% of service providers participating in the study believe Ethernet is mature for carrier class deployments, which is much different from the attitude of two years ago."

More highlights from the study:
  -- More than a fifth of service providers interviewed have stopped
     deployment and over half have slowed deployment of new SONET/SDH gear
     in their access networks
  -- Ethernet transport tunnels will be an essential ingredient of the
     services and optical transport layers
     -- T-MPLS and PBT, both very new technologies, show good growth as
        VPNs by 2008
     -- Over a quarter consider Ethernet tunneling protocols a critical
        feature on metro Ethernet equipment they will purchase in 2008
  -- The percent of service providers offering Ethernet over WDM for metro
     Ethernet services increases from 70% in 2007 to 85% after 2008, while
     the number offering Ethernet over SONET/SDH decreases from 93% to 78%
  -- Two-thirds have deployed hybrid products with Ethernet, WDM, and
     SONET/SDH in a single chassis, used to migrate to packet optical
     Transport

Download sample data at www.info.infonetics.com . For sales, contact Larry Howard, vice president, at larry@infonetics.com or +1 (408) 583-3335.

Infonetics Research ( www.infonetics.com ) is the premier international market research and consulting firm specializing in data networking and telecom. Services include quarterly market share and forecasting, end-user survey research, service provider survey research, and service provider capex analysis.

Press Contact: Michael Howard Principal Analyst and Co-Founder Infonetics Research (408) 583-3351 Email Contact