MEF19 Blogs

A substantial portion of today’s $60B Carrier Services’ market includes wholesale services supplied by one operator to another in order extend the service footprint beyond the retail service provider’s network reach. For many years, one of the challenges for the data connectivity services industry has been the lack of visibility into the performance of a Carrier Ethernet service in the sections running over wholesale partners’ networks. When a Carrier Ethernet service spanning networks from multiple operators starts to experience exceptions to the Service Level Agreement between the Service Provider and the enterprise subscriber, identifying the location of the source of the problem has been a highly manual process resulting in very slow responses with minimal information to customer concerns about performance.

MEF has defined standards for Carrier Ethernet Fault Management (MEF 30.1) and Carrier Ethernet Performance Monitoring (MEF 35.1), based on Y.1731, which have been in wide use by operators within their own respective domains for many years. However, when it comes to automated access to relevant information based on MEF 30.1 and MEF 35.1, the picture has been far less positive—that is until now. MEF 3.0 PoC (117), ‘MEF SOAM for High Value Multi-Operator Carrier Ethernet Services,’ led by Comcast and Cox with the collaboration of Ciena and Nokia, shows how the MEF’s LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) federation paradigm for orchestrating services spanning multiple operator domains—used in conjunction with well-established Service OAM mechanisms defined by MEF—provides a great deal of value, both to service providers and their enterprise customers. To gain further insight into multi-Operator SOAM for Carrier Ethernet, Daniel Bar-Lev, VP Strategic Programs at MEF, discussed the topic with Kelly Hoople, Director Product Development at Cox Business.