Carrier Ethernet World Congress 2009 Day 3: Evolution of Carrier Ethernet Technology

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By David Noguer Bau, Head of Carrier Ethernet, Juniper Networks

Last evening, as you may remember me mentioning yesterday, we had a really enjoyable MEF award dinner last night. It was great to have a fabulous chat with our partners and customers. As it is to be expected of such things, it went on very late and the adrenalin kick didn't quite subside till this morning when our forums reconvened.

The day began very early for us as Nils Swart, Juniper's Product Manager Edge and Aggregation, presented his panel "Innovation in business services and mobile backhaul" at 8:00 a.m. It sparked a great discussion on the costs of existing backhaul services in general terms and specifically at the critical edge of network applications.

Afterwards it was my turn, with the opportunity to present my panel "Innovating in Carrier Ethernet business services". I structured it in two parts, starting with two service providers presenting their experiences as case studies. During the second part, we had three vendors presenting their technology to leverage the advances in Carrier Ethernet OEM and to manage the network.

The main message was the fact that Carrier Ethernet is reaching its maturity in the market.. In one of the examples given today, a service provider with a worldwide carrier Ethernet service decided to start building strong differentiators in the network and took advantage of services on top of this Carrier Ethernet offer.

The  vendor contributions also showed that Carrier Ethernet services will go mainstream. All three vendors talked about OEM on Carrier Ethernet and also about the Ethernet demarcation to deliver performance monitoring and SLA support for business Ethernet customers. This launched a nice discussion which led to some excellent questions - the audience was hungry for information and interaction, they wanted "bits and bytes" and this is a good sign that Carrier Ethernet is reaching maturity.

Well, that's it for today. I must say it has been extremely productive and as always after a hard day's work it is always nice to relax with interesting people. So today we are heading to the beautiful Alexanderplatz in Berlin with some of our customers for a casual Berliner dinner. I'll try not to be up too late tonight and will be sure to let you know how the last day of the event unfolds tomorrow.