The Beginning: Metro Ethernet
The MEF was formed in 2001 to develop ubiquitous business services for Enterprise users principally accessed over optical metropolitan networks to connect their Enterprise LANs. The principal concept was to bring the simplicity and cost model of Ethernet to the wide area network.
Expansion to Carrier Ethernet
The success of Metro Ethernet Services caught the imagination of the world as the concept expanded to include worldwide services traversing national and global networks
- Access networks to provide availability to a much wider class of user over fiber, copper, cable, PON, and wireless
- Economy of scale from the resulting converged business, residential and wireless networks sharing the same infrastructure and services
- Scalability & rapid deployment of business applications
- Adoption of the certification program
- All while retaining the cost model and simplicity of Ethernet
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In the Enterprise, the first segments to benefit are Health Care, Finance, Education and Government. The applications that are enabled or greatly enhanced are site-to-site access, server consolidation, disaster recovery, Service Orientated Architecture and Internet access. The attractions to the IT departments are control, reliability, performance, scalability, cost reduction and simplicity of implementation for organizations that are usually under-resourced.
For Out of Office Use, the ubiquitous nature of Carrier Ethernet services are seen as an ideal way to deliver out-of-office seamless business connectivity, information/Internet, entertainment and voice/video communications. These are made compelling by the underlying favorable attributes for converged networking at low cost.
For better or worse, the days of going home to an offline, disconnected world are gone for ever.
Today we demand any application, any connectivity, on almost any device, whether accessing information or entertainment delivered via voice, video or data. We need to be “in the office” when we’re at home, and connected to our home when we’re at work. Wherever we are, we want always to be able to connect, any time, 24/7/365, on demand - and the performance better be good wherever we are in the world. And of course, we want it all to be delivered as one service.
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