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.

The MEF 3.0 PoC (115) will be of great interest to service providers that want to offer advanced managed SD-WAN services based on MEF 70 to enterprise customers using cloud services from branches with Internet access.

Fortinet, TCTS, and Spirent, have joined together to demonstrate the use case of secure Local Internet Breakout connecting to O365 and Azure from branch offices. To gain further insight on this project, Daniel Bar-Lev spoke with Nicolas Thomas, from Fortinet to understand this MEF 3.0 PoC.

With the service provider market increasingly adopting MEF 3.0 services as part of their digital transformation strategy, there is a corresponding increase in the availability of orchestrated connectivity services that span multiple service-provider domains. That, in turn, requires the streamlining of commercial, business, and operational interactions, between service providers through automation. Parts of the service lifecycle—like product offering qualification, quoting, and ordering—that need to be automated in order to enable dynamic data on-demand services, require instantaneous access to commercial and business information about partner service providers.

It's always exciting to see how MEF 3.0 is impacting our everyday lives. The MEF 3.0 PoC (126) 5G Factory—Private Enterprise Networks for Industry 4.0—is clearly one of those examples. For those that don't know what Industry 4.0 means, it is the title of the latest generation of manufacturing and logistics. A very good explanation can be found in the Forbes article, What is Industry 4.0? . In short, where Industry 3.0 was enabled by computerization, Industry 4.0 takes that computerization and adds communications’ networking to it to completely revolutionize manufacturing and logistics as we know them.

Service providers throughout the world are ready to implement the newly standardized MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs to automate the manual processes required for inter-provider business connections. Initial implementations of Sonata APIs are focused on helping to streamline how customers order Carrier Ethernet services, which includes verifying service availability and price quoting. Ultimately, the goal for investing in MEF LSO Sonata is ‘frictionless commerce’ across all market players.

Interview with Susan White, Head of SDN/NFV Strategy and Marketing, Netcracker.
4 Oct 2019

MEF recently published MEF 70: the standardized definition of SD-WAN services and their attributes. Combined with MEF 55—the LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) Reference Architecture—these standards empower service providers to deliver managed SD-WAN services to their enterprise customers using multiple SD-WAN vendor solutions, while supporting limitless numbers of customer sites.

Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) continue to attract the attention of enterprises eager to leverage the business benefits offered by the technology: for example, faster deployment of branch sites, cost savings from using private and public networks, optimized cloud connectivity, and application-aware routing.

For many enterprise WAN managers, adopting SD-WAN is a question of when not if. TeleGeography’s 2018 WAN Manager Survey queried network infrastructure managers at 60 mostly multinational enterprises and found that 83% of respondents were at least considering adopting SD-WAN.

MEF’s LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration) reference architecture empowers service providers with the blueprint they need to successfully transform their information technology & communications to address the digital economy. It provides the touch-points, related standards, and APIs, to support automation throughout their BSS/OSS—from enterprise subscriber through to the underlying network infrastructure, across transit and access partners, to the cloud. Far-reaching progress was made by MEF in June 2019 with the announcement of the LSO Sonata SDK Release 3 , which provides a set of standard open APIs for serviceability, quoting, product inventory, and ordering. Initially specifically targeting MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet services, LSO Sonata SDK establishes the framework for inter-provider service automation of all MEF 3.0 services including IP and SD-WAN services.

With the increasing growth and complexity of networks to meet the ever-escalating demand for bandwidth and new services, the need for network automation has never been greater. Broadband Success Partners recently conducted 1:1 in-depth interviews with North American and European cable MSO leaders about what is driving their network automation strategies and the resulting implications for network automation in the cable industry. To gain multiple perspectives, we spoke with 25 cable executives from Network Engineering, IT, Operations, and Business Services, across a dozen Tier-1 and Tier-2 operators.