Carrier Ethernet Service Differentiation – 2011 survey results Part 2

CEN Feature (Dec 15 2011) Business Ethernet , Managed Data Services , Metro Ethernet , Other analysts

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   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 9.6% indicating they were a monopoly or only slightly competitive.  

   In Part 2 we explore the attributes that service providers believe are most important to help differentiate their Carrier Ethernet offerings. We ask service providers to tell us what features and attributes they use to differentiate themselves and broke these down into two groups:  technical and non-technical. 

   We asked respondents to rate each feature as how important it was in differentiating their service offering from their competitors.  The choices were 1) not important, 2) neither important nor un-important, 3) important, 4) very important, 5) extremely important and 6) not applicable.

   The technical attributes we asked the respondents to rate (offered in random order) were as follows:

   • Multiple classes of services (CoS)
   • More than four (4) classes of service
   • Bundled services over single connection
   • QoS features based on deep packet inspection
   • Basic performance reporting
   • CoS performance reporting
   • Per Application performance reporting
   • Place few restrictions on customer traffic
   • High services availability and lower down time
   • Multipoint service offering (not just E-Line, for example)
   • Service offered in highly granular bandwidth increments
   • Extremely low latency
   • Very low cost per bit
   • High security

   The technical differentiators that generated the most “Extremely Important” votes were high availability and low downtime. Support for a “high degree of security” and “extremely low latency” came in a distant second and third, respectively.  The first two places were the same last year, but “multipoint service offering (E-LAN)“ dropped to third place this year.  Ninety-five percent of service providers believe that some sort of performance reporting was “Important,” “Very Important,” or “Extremely Important” to helping them differentiate their services.

   We were surprised to find that this year more than 61% of the respondents believed that supporting more than four classes of service was important compared with just 51% in 2010. This is an area that we were watching closely based on last year’s results, as it appeared to indicate a substantial opportunity for differentiation for those customers who need five or more service classes.

   Interestingly, some of the technical differentiators that generated the most “not applicable” votes were also some of the attributes that were deemed most “important” by other service providers.  For example, offering “QoS features based on deep packet inspection” was considered “not applicable” by 15.9% of the service providers while 52.3% felt it was important, very important or extremely important.  (See chart below)

   

   When we asked which SINGLE most important technical feature, the runaway leader was no surprise.  “High services availability and lower down time” was the clear winner.  (See chart below)

    

   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. The complete summary report will be available soon for download, so stay tuned.

    

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