The IEEE 802.3ah EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile) standard may help with last-mile costs, but it has limitations. And Carrier Ethernet is still generally available only in larger metro areas.
What's Here Now?
To get a feel for current Carrier Ethernet offerings we issued an RFI on behalf of our fictional company, Tac-Doh, which has eight sites within the continental United States interconnected over frame relay, DSL and leased lines. Three data centers are meshed with OC-3, with remote sites linking to the data centers using T3 frame relay or IPsec VPNs over DSL (see "Current WAN Setup" in the gallery).
We asked several service providers to fill out our detailed Carrier Ethernet RFI. Most politely declined--carriers are notoriously squirrelly about divulging information, especially on pricing, and divulging information is the name of the game in RFIs. Only Qwest Communications had the courage of its convictions and returned a response. Its service offering addressed our concerns, and its plans for expansion mesh well with what enterprises have been telling us is important. Our original RFI and Qwest's response are downloadable (at right).
After considering our bandwidth requirements and the differing CoS (class of service) requirements for our critical applications, Qwest engineered a Carrier Ethernet link with minimum and maximum bandwidth settings (see "Bandwidth by Location" ). Combined with our SLA goals, Qwest's proposed Carrier Ethernet offering seems to fit our needs. It doesn't come cheap, mind you, but the $142,000 monthly charge for a 36-month gold package contract does include WAN costs, a Cisco Catalyst 3750 at each location, and 24/7/365 management and monitoring.
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