Comcast Business Services has hit a milestone that its channel partners can use as a differentiator: the cable king has achieved the Carrier Ethernet 2.0 (CE 2.0) certification from the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) for its E-Line and E-LAN services.
“A milestone was reached this year when for the first time Carrier Ethernet services share of bandwidth exceeded the sum total of all legacy telecom services across the world, with Frost & Sullivan, Vertical Systems and Infonetics predicting a near $48 billion services market by 2015,” said Nan Chen, president at MEF. “We are therefore very pleased to see that Comcast has achieved the latest milestone in our industry – becoming the first CE 2.0 service provider.”
As more businesses shift from legacy telecom services to Ethernet, the new CE 2.0 certifications are designed to deliver improved classes of service, service manageability and interoperability for delivery across multiple networks.
The acknowledgement comes after extensive compliance testing by Iometrix, the MEF authorized certification test lab. Comcast Business Class Ethernet Private Line and Comcast Business Class Ethernet Virtual Private Line products are now considered CE 2.0 E-Line services, and Comcast Business Class Ethernet Network Service is a CE 2.0 E-LAN service.
“From major healthcare groups to regional banks and organizations connecting to data centers, a wide range of mid-market and enterprise customers are turning to Comcast’s Ethernet services based on our extensive network reach and service availability, true network diversity and continued investment in advanced network technologies,” said Mike Tighe, executive director of data services at Comcast Business Services. “As the first service provider in the world to offer CE 2.0 Ethernet services, this certification underscores our commitment to being a technology and standards leader in the Ethernet ecosystem to improve the quality, management and interoperability of Ethernet services for our customers.”
Point-to-point and multi-point Metro Ethernet services offer the capacity to deliver cloud computing, software-as-a-service, business continuity/disaster recovery and other bandwidth-intensive applications, providing scalable bandwidth from 1Mbps up to 10Gbps in Comcast’s case. Comcast’s all-IP network has a 100G backbone and spans 39 states and the District of Columbia and serves 20 of the top 25 U.S. markets. It leverages fiber and Ethernet over HFC.
