Spirent Verifies Carrier Ethernet Interconnectivity and Service Performance

Earlier this year the MEF ratified interconnect standards that enable service providers to understand how to expand their service coverage by seamlessly interconnecting with other providers to deliver an end-to-end service while maintaining global service level agreements (SLAs). The results of the Global Interconnect test event show that, while significant progress has been made in ENNI implementations, interoperability and provisioning challenges continue to exist.

“As Carrier Ethernet networks and services mature, it’s critical to move beyond basic, manual service interconnection,” said Carsten Rossenhövel, managing director of EANTC AG. “As we have seen in our series of tests, the ability to quickly and seamlessly provision services to monitor network performance and rapidly troubleshoot issues is critical across multiple carriers. By working with Spirent, we were able to deploy and test multiple production network services simultaneously across continents.”

Building on the previous phases of the Global Carrier Ethernet Interconnect demonstrations that were kicked off in January, this event focuses on validating Ethernet Service OAM and on verifying service performance across exchange points in New York and Frankfurt, Germany and networks spanning service providers in seven countries. This effort builds on the validation of MEF’s ENNI specification and multi-provider Class of Service (CoS) implementation options.

“Carrier Ethernet validation has been a focus of Spirent from the very beginning,” said John Cunningham, vice president of Service Assurance at Spirent. “Our ability to test the performance of live networks is central to advancing successful implementations of Carrier Ethernet across service provider networks.”

Spirent’s market leading performance monitoring and test and diagnostics solution, Spirent TestCenter Live™, was used to generate traffic, analyze how the traffic was mapped at the interconnect switch, and verify compliance with Ethernet OAM standards. The solution provided the critical visibility needed to validate EOAM traffic as it traversed the network. In addition, Spirent TestCenter Live™ was used to validate provisioning as the Ethernet Virtual Circuits (EVCs) were provisioned, allowing EANTC to rapidly address any network configuration issues. EANTC also used Spirent TestCenter ™ for additional bandwidth profile testing.

Spirent enables service providers to quickly validate the performance of Carrier Ethernet services delivery by offering test suites compliant with MEF specifications. In addition to supporting MEF standards on Spirent TestCenter, Spirent offers Spirent TestCenter Live, the only integrated test and diagnostic and performance monitoring solution that is fully compliant with standards such as ITU Y.1731 and IEEE 802.1ag.