MEF 'Quality of Service' Certifications Pave Way for Premium Carrier Ethernet Services; 40 Systems and 112 Services from 15 Vendors Meet Exacting Test Conditions

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) held a special awards
ceremony at GlobalComm, Chicago, today to celebrate the first group of
systems and services to comply with MEF 14 - Abstract Test Suite for
Traffic Management. This MEF Certification ensures conformance to the
MEF Quality of Service attributes - a requirement of SLAs (Service
Level Agreements) supporting simultaneous real-time and data intensive
business applications. The certificates were presented by Nan Chen,
the president of the Metro Ethernet Forum, and Bob Mandeville,
president and founder of Iometrix, the company responsible for the
conformance testing.
"Quality of Service is a critical attribute to ensure that Carrier
Ethernet services will deliver the strict performance and bandwidth
guarantees our business customers demand" says Michael Tighe, Director
of Corporate Strategy of Verizon, and chair of the MEF board, "These
14 vendors are to be congratulated for being the first to commit to
premium Carrier Ethernet services, and the challenge of submitting
their products to two months of exhaustive testing at the Iometrix
labs."
Bob Mandeville agrees: "The Test Plan for Traffic Management
developed by Iometrix includes no less than 183 test cases covering
EPL, EVPL and E-LAN services and engaging complex policing algorithms
applied to the UNI, the EVC and Classes of Service within the EVC.
These vendors, in committing to MEF14, have made a major step towards
true interoperability of the mechanisms providing service quality of
Carrier Ethernet Services. ".
MEF 14 is a major step towards making Ethernet truly
carrier-class. It is unique in that it provides clear
specifications-based guidelines for the formulation of SLAs. MEF 14
complements MEF 9 and covers two sets of MEF Service Attributes,
namely "Service Performance" and "Bandwidth Profiles". The first set
comprises three Service Performance attributes relating to the
Ethernet Virtual Circuits (EVC): Frame delay, Frame delay variation
and frame loss ratio. The second set, relating to the User Network
Interface (UNI) and following the familiar example of Frame Relay,
include four Bandwidth Profile attributes: CIR (Committed Information
Rate), CBS (Committed Burst Size), EIR (Excess Information Rate), EBS
(Excess Burst Size). Together MEF 9 and MEF 14 cover the complete set
of Carrier Ethernet Service Attributes defined in the core
definitional technical document MEF 10.
"Now Carrier Ethernet is delivering its promises on Quality of
Service in a standardized, independently verified manner," explains
Mark Whalley, co-chair of the MEF Marketing Committee, "For a Service
Provider end-customer, MEF 14 certification means confidence that the
equipment in the network is capable of providing tightly specified SLA
behaviour in terms of assured bandwidth and application
responsiveness. With the explosion in VoIP usage and the promise of
IPTV and other bandwidth hungry and delay- sensitive services, Carrier
Ethernet must deliver Quality of Service to maintain its momentum as
one of the fastest growing sectors in our industry."
The first fourteen companies to be presented with certification
for their respective systems today were: Actelis Networks, ADVA
Optical Networking, Alcatel, Atrica, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks,
Foundry Networks, Fujitsu Communications, Hatteras Networks, Lucent
Technologies, MRV, Siemens, Tellabs, T-pack and WorldWide Packets.

About The Metro Ethernet Forum:

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) is a global industry alliance
comprising more than 80 organizations including telecommunications
service providers, network equipment/software manufacturers,
semiconductors vendors and testing organizations. The MEF's mission is
to accelerate the worldwide adoption of Carrier-class Ethernet
networks and services. The MEF develops Carrier Ethernet technical
specifications and implementation agreements to promote
interoperability and deployment of Carrier Ethernet worldwide.
For more information about the Forum, including a complete listing
of all current MEF members, please visit the MEF web site at
www.MetroEthernetForum.org