Metro Ethernet Rising in Asia

Metro Ethernet is not just a North American or European
phenomenon. Asia’s got it, too, and it’s hitting big.

According to a recent report from Yankee Group, the Asia-Pacific region is
worth $675 million in Metro Ethernet revenues, second only to Europe.

Within
Asia, China is expected to be the fastest-developing market for Metro
Ethernet revenues, while India is noted as being an important market.

Yankee Group cites a gradual network migration and growing bandwidth
requirements as some of the reasons for Metro Ethernet growth in Asia.

Legacy packet data services may well be the losing side of the equation as
Ethernet moves in.

“Ethernet is inching into the WAN environment at the expense of traditional
packet data services, such as frame relay and ATM in the corporate market,”
Agatha Poon senior analyst at Yankee Group, told internetnews.com.

“With the imminent adoption of IP-based services, Ethernet will increase the
pace of IP migration.

“That being said, the capability of Ethernet to scale up to tens of gigabits
of bandwidth increases market appeal and drives ‘organic growth.'”

The dominance of Ethernet in Asia, though, is not without its challenges, as
there are still some barriers to adoption.

“From a business perspective, the biggest challenge facing service providers
is to strengthen the manageability and service performance of Ethernet in
the MAN/WAN environment,” Poon said. “This is especially true as global WAN
Ethernet becomes a reality.”

The need for improved performance and reliability in Metro Ethernet
technologies is not unknown to the big networking vendors. Cisco, Nortel
and Juniper Networks all recently rolled out initiatives to help meet the challenge of Metro Ethernet
networking.

Improved standards for Ethernet are also contributing to Ethernet’s ascendancy.