Carrier Ethernet Service Differentiation – survey results Part 2

CEN Feature (Sep 21 2010)

1. 

   In Part 1 of this series, we reported that most of the service provider respondents describe themselves as working in a competitive business environment, with only 8.1% indicating they were a monopoly or only slightly competitive.  You may download the complete summary report at the Overture Networks website.   

    

   In Part 2 we will explore the attributes that service providers believe are most important in helping differentiate their Carrier Ethernet offerings. We asked service providers to tell us what features and attributes they use to differentiate themselves and then broke these down into two groups: technical and non-technical. We asked respondents to rate each feature as to how important it was to differentiate their service offering from their competitors.

    

   As you see from the chart below, the technical differentiators that generated the most “Extremely Important” votes were high availability and low downtime. Support for a high degree of security and multipoint service offering (E-LAN) came in a distant second and third, respectively. 95% of service providers believe that some sort of performance reporting was “Important,” “Very Important,” or “Extremely Important” in helping them differentiate their services.

    

   We were surprised to find that 51% of the respondents believed that supporting more than five classes of service was important. This is an area that we will watch closely in future surveys, as it appears to indicate a substantial opportunity for differentiation for those customers who need five or more service classes.

    

   In part 3 of this series we’ll review the business attributes that service providers believe are most important to help differentiate their Carrier Ethernet offerings.

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