Industry Commentary

[This article originally appeared in Carrier Ethernet News]

The who’s who of Carrier Ethernet Europe gathered last week in Munich for the annual Light Reading Ethernet Europe.  Collocated with the MEF’s quarterly members’ meeting, this year’s event lived up to its billing as the premier Carrier Ethernet event in EMEA.

My schedule only allowed for a couple of brief visits into town which naturally included the requisite visit to the legendary Hofbrauhaus, for a few um-pa-pa’s, a very large stein of beer and some rockin’ pretzels.   

But the real highlight of the week was Carrier Ethernet.  In this post, I’ll recap a few highlights from the event.

In the flurry of news last week, it would be easy to miss a very meaty report by Sean Buckley of FierceTelecom.  In the series of stories, Sean profiled ten US incumbant operators and their Ethernet over Copper (EoC).  As most of the operators profiled are customers of Overture, we read it with eager anticipation. 

Industry Consensus: Carrier Ethernet Best for Delivering Cloud-based Services.

Here at Carrier Ethernet News, we strive to solicit the most reputable and knowledgeable industry experts as contributors to our feature series. As we close out our four-part series on Carrier Ethernet delivering Cloud-based services, we’re pleased to have gotten fantastic input from some individuals recognized as being influential in their respective fields and we are thankful for their time and contribution. So, as we move forward, it’s worthwhile to recap some of the highlights from the Cloud features written by our regular contributor Joan Engebretson over the past month.

In the first installment in this series, we reported that service provider CapEx spending on Carrier Ethernet equipment seems to be overtaking spending on SONET/SDH in transport applications and that the respondents overwhelmingly (nearly 100 percent agreement) indicated support for Carrier Ethernet in the access portion of the network, while closer to 80 percent support its use in the core.

The TIA is back in the live event business with a new event called “TIA 2011: Inside the Network.”

And I’m here in Grapevine, TX, just outside Dallas, soaking it all in and looking for signs of intelligent Carrier Ethernet life. With this new event, TIA has the chance to cast away its old baggage and the ghosts of SuperComm-GlobalComm-NexComm-WhateverComm past.