Metro Ethernet

METRO ETHERNET

May be defined as a platform to interconnect offices, branches and data centers of an organization (enterprise) in a metropolitan area. In fact, such office are not necessarily confined to city limits – they may also be spread in surrounding rural areas and even different cities, with distances ranging sometimes hundreds of miles, with some carriers offering Ethernet services to organizations spread nationwide.
Bandwidths offered are 10/100/1000/10000Mbps or fractions thereof.
While Ethernet services may be delivered over a variety of technologies (e.g. ATM, SONET, PDH/SDH), there is no doubt that the delivery of such as native Ethernet over fiber presents the most cost efficient and scaleable way. The actual signals running between the MAC (Media Access Concentrator) over the Optical Access Layer are 100FX or 1000LX (1000ZX) while the user interface (UNI) would be 100TX, 100FX or 1000SX.
The low cost of the gear (only 10%-20% of the cost legacy technologies like ATM or FR) makes the Metro Ethernet an extremely attractive solution   for SME (Small/Medium Enterprise), the worldwide population of which exceeds 25 million!
A recent (2004) survey conducted  by Heavy Reading among SMEs show that close to 85% of them already use Ethernet services or plan to in the near future.
According to Lightwave (June 2004) Ethernet Services revenues in the US will grow from 1% out of the total MAN/WAN revenues to 9% (out of $23B) in 2007. Yet another research (Infonetics Research, 2004) forecasts the global revenue of Ethernet services to exceed $22B by 2009 (from $2.5B in 2004).