AT&T Carrier Ethernet Perspectives

Rich Klapman, AT&T Director of Marketing for Ethernet Services, presented yesterday at the Lightreading Ethernet Expo. He provided some perspective on what AT&T is doing in Carrier Ethernet. He was one of several speakers who hit on the scarcity of fiber as a barrier to deploying Ethernet. Here are some raw notes.

• AT&T no bids only 3% of Ethernet service requests. They have a number of tools in their bag at this point to deliver Ethernet services to businesses, including Ethernet over PDH or allowing customers to bring their own access and meet AT&T in a carrier hotel.
• AT&T now pre-building Ethernet equipment into markets, trying to break addiction to TDM. Metrics set up within AT&T to measure progress.
• Ethernet services are difficult to scale right now because of widely varying customer configurations. Sales, technology, protocols, protection schemes, etc. Klapman claimed to have customer quotes on his laptop over a hundred different service configurations.
• Using SONET as the benchmark for delivery and reliability. “SOB” = “Sonet or Better”
• Expanding Ethernet over Copper services and have standardized on 2/4/8M speeds. Using EoTDM to get ubiquity because they often don’t have the fiber or can’t get someone to license it to them (kept hearing this from big carriers).
• T1s mostly go away in the next 10 years. (not sure I believe this)
• Starting to see 10G Ethernet requests as companies centralize data centers. 10GE customer connections completely break the backbone.
• Ethernet standardization is following same path as Frame Relay. Contrary to what the Metro Ethernet Forum says, Ethernet Network-Network Interfaces are at least 3 years away.

More to come.