Analysts agree, Carrier Ethernet is the way to go

CEN Feature (May 27 2010)

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   It’s always nice when someone smarter and with more resources than yourself agrees with a position you’ve taken. Thus, this week’s analysis by Infonetics Research Principal Analyst Michael Howard that “service provider investment in Carrier Ethernet is growing faster than overall telecom capital expenditures” and is “one of the areas that defied the economy” was a direct, albeit no doubt inadvertent, affirmation of what I’ve been saying all along.

   Carrier Ethernet is attracting investment because Carrier Ethernet is going to pay off in big dividends. The technology is everywhere you look and even the FCC, with its new third way of looking at broadband regulation, probably can’t affect its popularity.

   As Howard so correctly summed, “the (Carrier Ethernet) market is driven chiefly by the move to IP next-generation network transformation projects and growing traffic (particularly video traffic) from consumer, business and mobile backhaul networks.”

   Just think about your own usage cases. Have you gone a day without accessing some video, whether sent to you via e-mail, over a Web site like Hulu or YouTube or even as part of your everyday television viewing experience? Unless you’re living under a rock, you haven’t, and that’s why Carrier Ethernet is so important: it’s the best—only?—way to handle huge chunks of bandwidth and move it efficiently around a broadband network.

   My feeling is that Carrier Ethernet is probably still going to get its biggest boost this year from the mobile backhaul space. There are just too many applications from too many different mobile sources—iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid—for mobile carriers to resist selling more broadband-enabled devices. Once subscribers pay for a service that’s not cheap, they’re not going to be content to look at e-mail and tweets, twitters and IMS; they’re going to want to tap into music and video and those things carry a lot of weight in the backhaul.

   More likely cable operators, who have yet to really get into the mobile space, will be moving in shortly as well. Cox has been promising for most of the year that it’s on the verge of offering mobile wireless; Comcast just announced a 3G service; Clearwire, a 4G service with huge bandwidth hunger, is racking up more subscribers; and of course the mobile carriers like Sprint, AT&T and Verizon are all already on the bandwagon.

   It only means one thing, best summed up by Infonetics’ Michael Howard: “Carrier Ethernet technologies and products are a permanent, ingrained, inseparable and growing part of service provider networks, manifested in access, aggregation, core, metro and long haul.”

   Man it’s great when someone agrees with you.

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