What is an Ethernet Connection?

When we think of connecting to the outside world, what comes to mind is traditional telecom services. Those include POTS and PRI telephone lines for voice and T1, DS3 and OCx SONET for data. A newer technology that deserves a closer look is Carrier Ethernet. It’s Ethernet in the WAN to match up with Ethernet on the LAN.

The idea of extending an Ethernet connection from your building or campus to the Internet or another facility on the other side of the country might seem a bit odd at first. After all, the legacy telecom carriers have pretty much owned that space for over a century. That’s all changing fast. New competitive service providers are coming into the bandwidth marketplace without the history or traditions of using telco standards to define their networks. That frees them to take a “blank sheet” look at what a Wide Area Network (WAN) should be, how it should be priced and what services it should offer.

Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that the WAN starts where the LAN leaves off. I know that there’s often something called the MAN or Metropolitan Area Network in-between. MAN and WAN technologies are more alike than different. It’s mostly a matter of scale. While the MAN tends to cover a city and perhaps suburbs, the WAN has no geographical limitation. WAN services can be regional, national or even international.

Now let’s consider Ethernet WAN connections. Ethernet is the packet switching protocol now nearly ubiquitous on Local Area Networks. It wasn’t always that way. Even a few decades ago, there were competing standards such as Token Ring. Ethernet has become so popular now that the economy of manufacturing scale makes it more economical to implement than other standards. Ethernet has taken over the LAN, but it is just starting to make inroads on the WAN. In the coming decades, we may see a repeat of Ethernet dominance for local, metropolitan and wide area networks.

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has done the standardization work necessary to establish what’s known as Carrier Ethernet. This frees LAN Ethernet from its distance limitations so that it can connect from your building to the other side of the world. The MEF has also standardized Ethernet services so that the Ethernet you get from one carrier is the same as you get from another. This makes competitive bidding possible, driving down the cost for the buyer. It also enables carriers to extend their service footprint by interconnecting with other carriers through Ethernet Network to Network Interfaces (E-NNI).

WAN Ethernet has some definite advantages over the legacy telecom services we’re used to. First is the interface. If you want to connect to a T1 line or DS3 service, you need a specialized piece of equipment or a very specific plug-in module for your router. You can’t just take an Ethernet patch cord and connect your edge router to the carrier’s “smart jack.” The protocols are completely different. However, you can do exactly that with an Ethernet connection. Most often the carrier provides a common RJ-45 jack or a managed router that you simply patch into.

Second is services. You can order Ethernet Line Service to mimic the point to point or last mile dedicated Internet connections that you have with T1 or DS3. You can also order Ethernet LAN service. That’s a multipoint networking service that ties together multiple business locations. You don’t need to mess around with running individual private lines to each location. They all connect through the Ethernet LAN service.

Unlike T-Carrier and SONET services, Ethernet is highly scalable. In other words, you can get a wide range of bandwidths delivered to your installed Ethernet port. That will prove valuable if business suddenly increases and you need to increase your WAN bandwidth to handle the traffic. A change in bandwidth level can often be handled with a telephone call to your provider, with no need wait for equipment to be replaced.

Finally, Ethernet WAN connections have a cost advantage. It’s not uncommon to get twice the bandwidth for the same price as a T1 line. At higher speeds, the cost savings is even more dramatic.

You owe it yourself to at least compare services and pricing for Ethernet WAN connections to what you have now to see if you may be missing out on cost and performance benefits. Ethernet WAN is available over both twisted pair copper and fiber optic cabling.

Metro Ethernet For Your Business

Business users looking to expand a company network beyond their own building or campus have had to dig in and sort out the relative merits of DSL, T1, DS3, SONET fiber, ISDN and other communications standards. Everything but the Ethernet standard they are so familiar with on the local area network. No more. Now more and more businesses are gaining access to Metro Ethernet and saving a bundle in the process.

Metropolitan Ethernet, also known as Metro Ethernet or MetroE, is a wide area networking protocol that extends your LAN right out the door and across town. As a network administrator or management service provider, you no longer need to worry about limited bandwidths, protocol conversions or getting the right customer premises equipment to support your communications needs. Your Ethernet service provider installs a standard RJ45 networking jack. You plug an Ethernet cable into it and connect to the switch or router at the edge of your network.

Switch? Yes, it's Ethernet. That means you can use Ethernet switch ports to include a branch office across town. You can also connect your router to gain broadband access to the Internet via your Metro Ethernet connection. Perhaps you just want to standardize on Ethernet as your single networking protocol to link to branch offices, warehouses, suppliers, vendors, or franchisees across the country.

Nationwide? Yes. Metro Ethernet is the city-wide service for what is called Carrier Ethernet. The "carrier" designation means that this is a communications protocol with the scalability and reliability to be used by common carriers. Some of these carriers are traditional telcos who are updating their telephone-centric networks to transport Ethernet as well. Many others are competitive carriers without the telco legacy that have developed all-new state of the art fiber optic networks nationwide.

What about the underlying communications protocols that transport Carrier Ethernet? The beauty of this technology is that it has been designed to work with a wide variety of existing networks. They include native Ethernet based networks, MPLS networks based on IP transport, WDM or Wavelength Division Multiplexing fiber optic networks, and TDM networks including T1, T3, and SONET OC3, OC12, OC48 that were originally intended for telco trunking.

As a user, you needn't worry about what's at the core of the wide area transport network. Your connection will be a standardized Ethernet signal. The standardization group is the MEF or Metro Ethernet Forum, a alliance of 120 organizations including service providers and equipment manufacturers. Their mission is to : "...accelerate the worldwide adoption of Carrier-class Ethernet networks and services."

A major benefit of this move to Ethernet in the MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) and WAN (Wide Area Network) is getting away from the traditional pricing structure that always involved telephone companies for the last mile access. Instead, competitive carriers operate their own POPs or Points of Presence that function as their Central Offices. You may be able to contract with a single provider for both local and long haul carrier services... at a huge price bread from what you might expect.

Ethernet services typically start at 10 Mbps, the same speed as standard Ethernet in the LAN. Most providers also offer 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet service to match your network requirements. No longer are you stuck cramming your data through a narrow pipe just to get it across town or across the country. Your costs per Mbps are likely to be anywhere from 20 to 50% what you'd pay for equivalent bandwidth using traditional TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) services.

Is Metro Ethernet the right network service for your company? Find out now if your building is already lit for Carrier Ethernet service or there is a carrier POP nearby. If so, you could soon be enjoying the benefits of Ethernet end-to-end.

Ethernet Domination

Someday in the not too distant future there will be Ethernet and only Ethernet. That's one possible, perhaps even likely, scenario that's popped up with the proliferation of Ethernet WAN services.

It wasn't that long ago that there was a choice in local networking technologies. Token Bus, Token Ring. But what protocol does nearly every NIC or Network Interface Card ship with today? It's Ethernet. The only question is one of speed. The interface could be 10, 100, or 1,000 Mbps with 10 Gbps soon to be widely available at reasonable prices. Local Area Networks are Ethernet structures. Most have gone to a subset, switched Ethernet, for full duplex operation. Coaxial cable has given way to twisted pair copper wiring and RJ-45 connectors. Copper is now being challenged by fiber optics.

What is driving standardization toward a single networking standard in the LAN is as simple as cost. Economy of scale means that once NICs, wiring, switches, routers and connectors are in large scale production, they get cheaper by the unit. Pretty soon other technologies are at a cost disadvantage and start to disappear. Lower volume production runs hasten their demise.

The LAN revolution is over but the WAN revolution is in full swing. Wide Area Networks started as analog dial-up and went to telephone company developed Time Division Multiplexing standards that are dominant today. But Ethernet is escaping into the Metro Area Networks and into long haul connections. MPLS networks hope to be the successor to the circuit switched model used for SONET and other TDM technologies. But even MPLS may be an intermediate solution. The dominant networking protocol could actually wind up being Ethernet end-to-end.

Is that possible? It is actually available right now for many businesses. Imagine connecting your office in New York with your offices in Los Angeles and Seattle in one very large network. Not just communicating from location to location by going through multiple protocol conversions. But connecting LANs together to transparently create a single large company network.

Ethernet transport services from intra-city to inter-state are available from competitive carriers who operate their own private regional and national networks. They are fiber optic based to offers bandwidths that include classic 10 Mbps Ethernet, 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, and 1,000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet. As 10 GigE networks proliferate, that level of WAN Ethernet service will likely become available as needed. Larger service providers are now in the process of upgrading to 40 Gbps and even 100 Gbps in their core networks to meet the rising demand for bandwidth, driven especially by video streams.

Here's another surprise. Even though Ethernet is the newer technology, it also offers a price advantage per Mbps of bandwidth. You could be paying less than half of what you are now for high bandwidth WAN connections. Would you like to know what the best offers are for your location? Find out now with an easy online Ethernet service search