Bandwidth and other service changes can be administered remotely, simplifying and accelerating service provisioning.Įthernet services are widely viewed as an offering that holds promise for rapid acceptance in the marketplace.
With Ether net service, on the other hand, a service provider can drop a Fast Ethernet (100-Mbit/sec capacity) or Gigabit Ethernet (1,000-Mbit/sec capacity) port to a subscriber once and upgrade many times, without additional truck rolls beyond the initial installation. Thus, hardware required for a T1 (1.54-Mbit/sec) service is completely different from that required for DS-3 (44.736-Mbit/sec) or OC-3 (155.52-Mbit/sec) services.
With legacy data services, physical interface requirements vary with the speed of the service. A key difference between Ethernet services and legacy data services such as leased lines, frame relay, or ATM is the scalability of the service interface. Simply defined, an Ethernet service is any data service offered via an Ethernet interface-a 10-Mbit/sec, 100-Mbit/sec, or 1-Gbit/sec Ethernet port.
How does the emerging resilient packet ring (RPR) technology compare to incumbent architectures based on Ethernet switching and SONET add/drop multiplexers (ADMs) in terms of network scalability and efficiency? Ethernet services are gaining broad popularity because of their inherent scaling advantages. Scalability is an issue both from a service perspective and from a network perspective.
Ethernet switches connected by point-to-point links queue and schedule traffic at each node.