Why Fiber Optic Metro Ethernet Makes So Much Sense

By: John Shepler

You know that there are multiple options for connecting your headquarters, branch offices, warehouses, factories, stores, schools or medical centers. Are you sure that you have an optimum solution for the network performance you need? Let’s take a closer look at at Metro Ethernet networks and see why they might be exactly what you need.

Metro Ethernet or Metro E networks are a special implementation of Metro Area Networks (MAN). MEN instead of MAN give you two big advantages or other networking options. First is that your network protocol remains as Ethernet from end to end. Second is the pricing advantage that optical Metro Ethernet networks have over other solutions.

The Ethernet in Metro Ethernet is also called Carrier Ethernet. It’s the same switched Ethernet protocol that you have running on your local area networks, but extended for transport over longer distances. The big difference between LANs and MANs or WANs is that once the traffic leaves the network you own, it needs a telecom carrier to get it across town or across the country. You can’t provide this transport on your own. You need to contract with a carrier or service provider that has the long distance connectivity.

If you have been using T1 lines, DS3 bandwidth or SONET/SDH fiber optic services to carry your traffic, you know that a protocol conversion is involved. These telecom services are based on circuit switched technology rather than the packet switched technology running on your network.

The protocol conversion is done inside an appliance or, more often, a plug-in module for your network edge router. This makes the MAN setup unique to the service and bandwidth level that’s engineered for your specific needs. Anytime you need to change something, like make a bandwidth increase, equipment and perhaps network design needs to change. This takes a lot of time and sometimes a bundle of money to implement.

Metro Ethernet networks take a different approach. The core network is IP or MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) so that it can easily transport Ethernet packets without having to convert to and from one of the TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) protocols. This opens up the opportunity to connect your networks at the layer 2 switching rather than the layer 3 routing level.

The three layer 2 Ethernet services you should be aware of are Ethernet Line (E-Line), Ethernet LAN (E-LAN) and Ethernet Tree (E-Tree). Ethernet Line is a private line connection from point A to point B. This can directly replace older technology T1, DS3 or OCx connections.

E-LAN is a meshed multipoint to multipoint service that is often the best answer for how to easily and securely connect multiple business locations on a single private network. All locations can talk to each other but each location only needs a last mile connection to the Metro Ethernet network.

E-Tree is a special service of interest to service or content providers. It is a one to many network topology that transfers files form your root out to dozens or hundreds or thousands of “leaves” that can communicate with you but not each other.

Metro Ethernet networks have a cost advantage over dedicated point to point services when you need more than a single line. You pay for use of the multi-tenant metro network plus the last mile connectivity for each location. There is another valuable cost and performance savings that comes from all-fiber solutions.

Remember that traditional Metropolitan Area Network connections are set up specifically for a certain bandwidth level. It’s hard to scale much because of equipment changes that are needed when you jump from one standard bandwidth to another. Carrier Ethernet works differently. An Ethernet connection can handle any bandwidth up to the maximum speed of the installed port. If you have a 10 Mbps port, you can have any bandwidth up to and including 10 Mbps. A 100 Mbps port will handle all bandwidth levels up to 100 Mbps. The service levels are easily scalable, often in increments as small as 1 Mbps.

What this means is that you don’t have to order all the bandwidth you think you’ll ever need just to be sure that you can quickly accommodate increases in business levels. You simply order ports (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10,000 Mbps) to support your expected requirements. Then order the bandwidth you need now with the knowledge that your ports have the reserve to quickly scale up later.

Why do all-optical Metro Ethernet solutions make sense? One advantage is that fiber can easily handle any bandwidth you require now or in the future. Another, more subtle, reason is that many service providers can connect you on fiber they own rather than something they have to lease from the local phone companies. This one-provider solution offers a significant cost savings as well as a single responsible service provider for all issues.

Do you need connectivity to multiple locations within one or more metropolitan areas? Learn more about your available Metro Ethernet options and pricing now.


Note: Photo of city lights courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

FastE Fiber as MetroE for Business Ethernet Service

Business bandwidth demands are not only rising, but rising fast. What’s a good solution for fast data transfer? Fast Ethernet is an excellent option. It is readily available and affordable over fiber optic connections nationwide. Let’s take a closer look at how FastE works and how it fits into your bandwidth strategy.

Chances are that you’ve been using Fast Ethernet or FastE for years on your own network. Fast Ethernet is another name for 100 Mbps Ethernet. Standard Ethernet is 10 Mbps, Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet is 1,000 Mbps. Network Interface Cards (NICs) in every device with an Ethernet jack, also called a port, support one or more of these Ethernet speeds. For instance, a 10/100 port supports Ethernet communications at 10 Mbps and also 100 Mbps. A 10/100/1000 port includes 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Gbps.

Nearly every computer, switch, router, modem, firewall, printer, NAS (Network Attached Storage) Disk and other network device supports 10/100 Ethernet. The 10/100/1000 spec is becoming more and more prevalent. In both cases, these devices support Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps.

So, what doesn’t support Fast Ethernet communication? Many MAN and WAN connections come nowhere close. Clearly computer technology has accelerated faster than communications technology. Actually, support for 100 Mbps communication over long distances has been available for a long time. It’s just that you needed special interfacing and the cost was beyond what most businesses were willing to pay.

High priced proprietary data communications are a legacy of the telephone industry. Nearly every company has ordered a DSL or T1 line to be able to communicate between business locations and connect to the public Internet. The cost of those lines has fallen dramatically in recent years. Even so, the limited bandwidth is starting to become an uncomfortable constraint on even smaller operations.

What’s changed the game recently is the introduction of Carrier Ethernet services. Carrier means that you lease these lines from a service provider, a carrier, rather than stringing the wires yourself. Any connection that goes beyond your property is handled by carriers. At one time the only carrier available was the local telephone company. Deregulation has allowed other service providers, called competitive carriers, to enter the marketplace and compete on technology and price.

Carrier Ethernet is one of those competitive services, although you’ll now find it offered by incumbent as well as competitive carriers. What’s allowed Carrier Ethernet to grow by leaps and bounds is standardization by an industry group called the MEF or Metro Ethernet Forum. Any provider that meets the MEF standards will be compatible with Carrier Ethernet equipment and interconnection with other provider networks.

Fast Ethernet is one of the Carrier Ethernet services you can order in both metropolitan and long haul connections. These are known as MAN or Metropolitan Area Networks and WAN or Wide Area Networks. The difference is really one of scale. The MAN serves a local geographical area that includes a city and surrounding suburbs. The WAN joins cities and may cross state and national borders. International WANs use undersea fiber to link far-flung destinations worldwide.

Metro networks based on Ethernet rather than the older SONET technology are sometimes referred to as MEN or Metro Ethernet Networks. You’ll hear them referred to as MetroE networks. These networks are almost always based on fiber optic rather than copper lines. Increasingly, so are the connections to the network. It’s fiber all the way for FastE and above.

What kind of connection can you make to a MetroE network. One of the most popular is the Fast Ethernet or FastE connection at 100 Mbps. Another popular service level is GigE at 1000 Mbps. What’s just emerging now as a business service level is 10 GigE at 10000 Mbps or 10 Gbps.

Going Ethernet all the way through your network, across the metro or wide area networks and to another LAN at the far end, has some real benefits. The interface is trivially easy. Your handoff from the carrier is a standard fiber or copper Ethernet jack. You’ll also be able to order both point to point connections called E-Line and meshed multi-location connections called E-LAN. Don’t think that you are stuck with only the standard Ethernet speeds either. You can generally get many increments between 10, 100, 1000 and 10000 Mbps.

The biggest advantage of all is cost savings. You’ll pay far less per Mbps for Ethernet than other services. The difference is sometimes half as much for Ethernet as SONET or other telecom services. This easily allows you to afford the bandwidth you really need for today’s communication-intensive applications such as cloud services.

Is your business bandwidth constrained? No need to be stuck at low copper technology speeds when fiber connections to high bandwidth metro and wide area networks are available and affordable. Check now for bandwidth services and prices available for your business location.

MAN and MEN - Metropolitan Networking

When your local area network expands beyond the property that you own or lease, what you need is a MAN. That’s MAN as in Metropolitan Area Network. Let’s take a look at what the MAN is all about and how you use one or more to expand your company network.

The idea behind a metro network is that many offices, medical centers, manufacturers, governmental bodies and retailers have multiple locations within the same geographical area. Within a particular building or campus, you are free to install as much wiring as you want. But what happens when you need to get that connection across town?

The legacy answer is to lease point to point dedicated circuits from a telco provider. These can be T1 lines, DS3 for higher bandwidth or very expensive OC3 and above optical connections. Essentially, you create your own metropolitan networks from leased lines and routers that you install and manage.

It turns out that many, many businesses and organizations need this same service. This opens the opportunity for a metro network operator to install the necessary fiber optic cabling, add-drop multiplexers and other equipment to create a publicly available resource that meets the needs of most businesses in the area. By connecting to the MAN instead of building your own network, you can save considerable cost. You’ll also likely have additional resources at your disposal just in case your bandwidth needs suddenly increase.

Metro networks have more inherent security than the Internet in that there is no general public access. The residential users downloading movies and browsing the Internet or looking for mischief have no real need for the MAN and aren’t willing to pony up the price of a connection. Certainly, you have the ability to encrypt any packets you send through the MAN to improve security even further.

Many Metropolitan Area Networks are built from SONET rings, which are fiber optic networks organized as rings with many access points. Usually there are at least two fiber rings sending traffic in opposite directions. The idea is that if one strand fails, the other redundant strand will maintain the network. A ring arrangement is a good fit with most metro needs. The ring circles the business district and includes important industrial parks, hospital campuses, office complexes and the like.

The newest development is MEN as a specific type of MAN. MEN stands for Metropolitan Ethernet Network. This network is based on the Ethernet protocol, although it may be running on a SONET core network or a native IP network. As a user, you are able to get Ethernet service in the metro area.

What makes Ethernet so desirable? Metro Ethernet is based on standards established by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) so that you know what to expect when you order a particular Ethernet service. There are two services of particular interest to most business users. The first is E-Line which is a private dedicated point to point connection between two locations. You use E-line the same way you’d use a T1 line, except that you have many more bandwidth options and the price per Mbps is often much lower than traditional telecom services.

The other service of note is E-LAN, a private LAN service. But you already have a LAN, right? Not like this one. E-LAN is a metro network version of the LAN. It connects the individual LANs at each of your metro locations to make one large bridged LAN connecting all of them in a layer 2 meshed network. It’s as if all those different buildings were really just different departments in the same building.

How do you connect to the MAN? Typical methods include T1 lines, DS3 and OC3 or OC12 fiber last mile connections. However, if you want to take advantage of Ethernet services like E-LAN, you’ll need EFM or Ethernet in the First Mile. You can use Ethernet over Copper for bandwidths from 1 to 100 Mbps. Higher speeds require Gigabit Ethernet or 10 GigE fiber optic service.

In some downtown areas, there is such as thing as a fixed wireless MAN. This is different from 3G and 4G cellular wireless intended for smartphones. Fixed wireless operates on private licensed frequencies with directional transmission from the service provider to all-weather terminal equipment mounted to the roof of each customer. High speeds, excellent security and fast installation characterize fixed wireless MAN.

What type of metro networking will work best for your business or organization? The best way to evaluate your choices is to get a list of available services and pricing for Metropolitan Area Networks serving your location.

Fast MEN Available Cheap

When you’ve got packets to move and lots of them, you need MEN to get them from point A to point B. If your MAN is a sluggish wimp, what you need is real MEN to get things moving. If the cost of your telecom connection has you seeing red, what you need is MEN - fast and cheap MEN.

What this testosterone laden introduction suggests is that MEN are the answer to your telecommunications problems. So they are, as long as we’re talking about Metropolitan Ethernet Networks as the MEN in question. What? You were expecting some guy in a cape?

Metro Ethernet is rapidly becoming the connectivity solution of choice in downtown and suburban areas for two reasons. Compared to traditional telecom solutions, they are fast and they are cheap.

Normally fast and cheap don’t go together, at least in the technology world. If you want more bandwidth, you pay more money. It’s a simple and longstanding relationship. Well, your relationship with MEN is going to change all that. Metropolitan Ethernet offers the connectivity you need from point to point or multipoint to multipoint at prices per Mbps that can be half that of high bandwidth SONET services and even less than T1 lines.

Metro Ethernet is a fairly new business-grade telecom service that has been standardized by the Metro Ethernet Forum, an industry standards group. The move from circuit switched telecom to packet switched networks, such as Ethernet, is based on the almost universal adoption of Ethernet as the local area networking protocol of choice. If every LAN is running Ethernet, then why do a protocol conversion between the local network and the wide area network only to get the packets across town?

Why, indeed? When all inter-location connections were under the control of local telephone companies, then telephone company standards defined the services available. Now that competitive carriers have entered the marketplace with their own networks based on IP rather that telco TDM standards, there’s no good reason not to keep the networks and all their connections as Ethernet. Interfacing is trivial, network efficiency is improved, and scalable service levels are much easier to provide. It’s not unusual to be able to purchase Metro Ethernet services in 1 Mbps increments and add bandwidth when your business needs dictate.

Just how powerful are these MEN? They range in bandwidth from 1 Mbps on up, although 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet and 1000 Gigabit Ethernet levels are very popular as they mirror the standard LAN and network interface speeds. Lower bandwidth services, including standard 10 Mbps Ethernet, may be provisioned over copper as well as fiber to save construction costs for buildings that are not “lit” for fiber service. You need to be reasonably near a carrier’s facilities for Ethernet over Copper or EoC to work.

Would you benefit by putting real MEN to work for your organization? If so, check pricing and availability of Metropolitan Ethernet Network services for your location.