Among the characteristics of Carrier Ethernet making it a really carrier-class technology is its support for differentiated services. Service providers can take advantage of this to provide a wide selection of Ethernet services that may be delivered end to end, whether or not they operate in the retail, wholesale as well as mobile space.

Unsurprisingly, however, different operators in different sectors have different network requirements as it pertains to deploying differentiated Ethernet services, which entails different solutions and best practices, to incorporate regions of first-layer aggregation, demarcation and Ethernet access.

As such, there are many key differences operators should be familiar with as it pertains to running Ethernet services for wholesale, retail and mobile backhaul networks.

Key differences Retail customers will typically be located both in-region and out-of-region. This implies relying on wholesalers for out of region access and could conceivably require negotiating service contracts with a number of wholesalers in order to service a retail customer. This can be time consuming. Carrier Ethernet exchanges, that could ameliorate a few of the inter-connect difficulties and speed the method, are beginning to gain traction but are not universally available. The last mile in any event might be over different physical infrastructures, but the end user quality of experience must remain the same. business ethernet services

The retail operator must also ensure SLAs to the end user and verify it vis a vis their customers. There are always a number of scenarios for this. The Carrier Ethernet (CE) demarcation device or NID could be deployed back-to-back by both the wholesaler and retail operator, or the wholesale operator would manage the service end-to-end in its region but allow the retail operator usage of the PM KPIs or the wholesale operator would provide a service VPN to the retail operator from the single CE demarcation device.

Retail customers also require multiple services - four to five, normally - with an assortment of CIR and EIR bandwidth. If a few of the retail branches have high capacity needs but can only just be reached over bonded copper or DSL bonding then sophisticated traffic management schemes are required in the CE demark device to prevent congestion and service impairment.

Also network requirements vary in accordance with retail customers' applications. Are they connecting data centers, departmental LANs? Simply how much bandwidth is required per site? How scalable could be the network? Perhaps the retail operator can provide a mixture of Layer 2 and Layer 3 services. Could be the traffic bursty? Symmetric or asymmetric? Financial service customers require ultra low latency, for example. Most of these will determine the retail operators' service offering to their customer.