It’s a pretty classic problem in the telecom industry: you have a customer that wants your service for a number of locations, but the problem is some of those locations happen to be in markets others where you don’t have an operational network.

This problem is even more pronounced in the carrier Ethernet domain where service providers are struggling to expand their respective national and international footprints. Service providers have to work with other partners to establish pre-standard Ethernet Network to Network Interconnection (E-NNI) arrangements....

Erin Dunne, director of research services for Vertical Systems Group, says that while ADVA may be early in the game, the new NNI device does have promise.

“This kind of demarc-style NNI networking monitoring product right now is a nice to have because there’s a lot of other things that have to happen to make Ethernet widespread,” she says. “Those things are happening, and the types of issues this NNI box addresses will be the next wave of critical issues. We’re just starting to hit the requirements, and it’s really something on a wholesale basis where this type of solution has to happen for Ethernet services to become widespread.”

Still, as service providers scale their respective Ethernet footprints, there’s a responsibility to the end-customer to provide a consistent service experience.

When the service is coming directly from one carrier, it’s a bit easier to control from a QoS perspective. However, when a service provider has to go through partners, they need to be able to ensure that all of the connections going into the customer site can be monitored and fixed appropriately.

Dunne believes that a product like ADVA’s 150 CM could help service providers better manage all of the partner connections it requires to serve the enterprise customer.

“It’s hard to scale these types of networks and provide the types of value-added services that enterprise customers are coming to expect especially if they’re migrating from legacy Layer-2 service like Frame Relay, ATM or private line,” she says. “[Enterprise customers] want end-to-end SLAs they can monitor, they want to know who they can yell at if the network goes down, and this is the kind of thing that this NNI box will enable because no one carrier can deliver carrier Ethernet services everywhere.”

Complete article on Telecommunications Online