Video Traffic Boom Spawns Metro Ethernet Product Race
September 26, 2007 – A gathering perfect storm of network capacity-gobbling traffic is creating a metro Ethernet innovation race, as Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks introduce new products targeted to wireline, mobile and data center sectors alike.
This week, Juniper unveiled new MX240 and MX480 Ethernet switch/routers offering smaller form factors for a range of transport and routing applications including metro core; data center; telco DSLAM and FTTH aggregation; cable MPEG video and modem termination system aggregation; and fiber-based 3G cell tower backhaul.
Juniper says its MX series, now supporting Gigabit Ethernet interfaces ranging from 240 to 960 gigabits, has raised the bar not only in capacity options, but in supporting up to 1 million media access control (MAC) addresses per chassis—a requirement that will multiply with the coming proliferation of set-top boxes, WiMAX and other portable and mobile devices, says Ravi Medikonda, director of service provider marketing for Juniper.
At the same time, Cisco has introduced the ME 3400 24FS, a purpose-built solution designed to enable operators to extend fiber-to-the-home to apartment buildings and other multi-dwelling units (MDUs) rapidly and with low operational expenses. The new platform would bring multi-gigabit triple-play traffic to MTU basements, enabling 100-megabit-per-second services to each dwelling.
Cisco simultaneously announced other enhancements to the Carrier Ethernet portfolio of its IP Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture: 50ms resiliency from core to premise and new instrumentation for measuring customer service level agreements, enabling operators offer IPTV service level agreements (SLAs).
Both companies argue that video traffic in particular is requiring significant upgrades in metro transport capacity and switching/routing flexibility, jobs perfectly suited to Ethernet and IP switching and routing.
According to Cisco research:
? Internet video-to-PC traffic will increase by a factor of nearly 10 between 2006 and 2011, reaching just under 1 Exabyte per month;
? Internet video-to-TV will increase by a factor of 10 between 2007 and 2011, reaching over 1 Exabyte per month; and
? Non-Internet IP video will increase by a factor of 20 between 2006 and 2011, reaching over 10 Exabytes per month.
The research concludes that those trends will push metro traffic to 18 Exabytes per month by 2011, and while 7 Exabytes of will be Internet traffic, the remainder will be primarily due to the transport of commercial video-on-demand (VoD).
“Video is going to redefine the next-generation network,” says Suraj Shetty, senior director, service provider marketing, for Cisco. “Much TV viewing is moving to nonlinear, and with video on demand, it is hard to predict network requirements several years ahead. Ethernet has proven over time the most cost effective way to build an IP network that is resilient enough to maintain experience quality as it scales. Business applications provides another dimension,” he adds. “Telepresence with each TV screen having a 10-megabit stream creates a huge impact on the LAN and WAN.
“Bandwidth drives applications, and applications drive bandwidth,” in a manner that continually ripples from last-mile access into the metro core, Shetty says. “Two megabits was good enough for peer-to-peer, 5 megabits enabled Web 2.0 and YouTube. Now 25 megbits opens a new IPTV market, and access is already up to a gigabit in places like Japan. There’s a huge investment going on here.”
Juniper's Medikonda sites similar market drivers for Metro Ethernet, including the movement to Ethernet transport of VOD delivery, DSLAM aggregation, mobile cell site backhaul and business services. “Ethernet is becoming technology of choice,” he says. “It is being used to supplement Sonet rings, particularly for video content and mission critical services including software as services.”
According to Medikonda, the coming metro network investment cycle is being led on a global basis by wireline networks who are deploying IPTV and broadband on a large scale, while much mobile operator metro transport remains on wireline carrier networks and while cable remains largely a North American business.
He notes that IPTV will likely prove the largest single contributor to traffic growth, as it requires replication of video streams for multicasting. “In addition to IPTV telco video, the biggest driver we’re seeing is over-the-top video such as Xbox Live and YouTube-type applications, and video is even cropping up in corporate networks, such as technology companies like ours adding video pages to online data sheets. This is a $3.6 billion market doubling in the next three to four years.”
Indeed, Synergy Research is forecasting Carrier Ethernet Equipment revenue to increase to over $7 billion by 2011.
Seeking shares of that growth, Cisco and Juniper are competing with Alcatel-Lucent, which earlier this year upgraded its Service Router Operating System (SR OS) for the Alcatel-Lucent IP Service Router (SR) and Ethernet Service Switch (ESS) platforms, injecting new Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MC-LAG) and Subscriber Routed Redundancy Protocol (SRRP) extensions to establish multiple layers of link redundancy across access, aggregation, service edge and core segments of their metro networks.
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