Carriers Advance Initiative to Scale Ethernet Service Interconnectivity

Following its GEN14 announcement of the project launch in November, the MEF has now approved the next phase of the MEF Ethernet Interconnect Points (EIP) project to standardize guidelines for current and future Ethernet Carriers around the globe.  In a first for the MEF, the organization has assembled some of the largest Ethernet Operators, all under one roof, for the purpose of streamlining how they interconnect their Carrier Ethernet services. The EIP project complements a separate, newly introduced MEF initiative – the Services Interconnect Program (MEF-SI) – that will give hundreds of small wholesale Carrier Ethernet Operators the opportunity to offer standards-compliant Carrier Ethernet services quickly for their customers.

The EIP project will provide rapid feedback from prototyping to help the project participants agree on a common approach to interconnecting by using MEF specifications. EIPs comprise all aspects of Ethernet interconnect – including all the requirements needed to provide a customer with an end-to–end Ethernet service spanning multiple operators. Specific aspects include: location selection, External Network-to-Network Interface (ENNI) parameters, and alignment of business processes.

With more than 50 current MEF specifications for Carrier Ethernet architectures, connectivity services, and service lifecycles – and many more in the pipeline to cover the emerging area of Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) – demand for implementation guidelines for multi-carrier environments is growing rapidly. The EIP project is developing use cases representing topologies and service characteristics typically used by carriers that interconnect their Carrier Ethernet services with one another to create end-to-end Carrier Ethernet services.