In the first installment in this series, we reported that service provider CapEx spending on Carrier Ethernet equipment seems to be overtaking spending on SONET/SDH in transport applications and that the respondents overwhelmingly (nearly 100 percent agreement) indicated support for Carrier Ethernet in the access portion of the network, while closer to 80 percent support its use in the core.

This week, we will analyze the results of one of the key questions. Respondents were asked to indicate if they strongly agree, agree, somewhat agree, disagree or strongly disagree with six statements shown in the chart below.

First off, I must say these results are overwhelmingly positive and bode well for the near term success of Carrier Ethernet as the successor to SONET/SDH in the network.

Jumping right to the bottom of the chart, the vast majority agree that Carrier Ethernet is more cost effective than SONET/SDH in transport and access applications. This is, of course, not likely a surprise to the readership of Carrier Ethernet News. It is clear from the chart that one area where the Carrier Ethernet industry has work to do in timing and synchronization.

With standards like ITU-T G.8262 (a.k.a. SynchE) and IEEE 1588v2 emerging as relative newcomers, we suspect the perception of Ethernet’s timing and synchronization weakness will improve over time.

One area where we were a little surprised to see no respondents “strongly disagree” was in the first question on reliability. After more than 10 years spent developing reliable Carrier Ethernet solutions designed to meet or exceed that of their SONET/SDH brethren, I personally am pleased to see the results of this one.

The responses to the questions about QoS and Latency are very positive but slightly more balanced while it looks like there are still concerns by many about the security of Carrier Ethernet relative to SONET/SDH.