The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) on Tuesday announced the winners of its U.S. carrier Ethernet service provider of the year award and named its first group of vendors to comply with MEF 14 spec.
Verizon Communications Inc. received the “Service Provider of the Year - Best in Business” award and Optimum Lightpath received the “Service Provider of the Year - Outstanding Innovation” award.
Verizon was chosen on the strength of its marketing excellence, major Ethernet infrastructure investment and consequent 77 percent growth from an already large Ethernet customer base.
Optimum Lightpath was chosen for its broad spectrum of innovation on all three measured criteria – technical, service and business.
Finalists for the Service Provider of the Year Awards included: AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp., Masergy Communications Inc., Met-Net, MTS-Allstream, Optimum Lightpath, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, XO Communications Inc. and Yipes Enterprise Services Inc.
The judging panel included analysts David Hold, Current Analysis Inc.; Michael Howard, Infonetics Research; Stan Hubbard, Heavy Reading; Ron Kaplan, IDC; Nick Maynard, Yankee Group Research Inc.; Bob Mandeville, Iometrix; and the MEF Board.
MEF also announced 40 systems and 112 services from 15 vendors tested compliant with MEF 14 – Abstract Test Suite for Traffic Management. Certified vendors included Actelis Networks Inc., ADVA Optical Networking, Alcatel, Atrica, Cisco Systems Inc., Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, Fujitsu Network Communications, Hatteras Networks, Lucent Technologies Inc., MRV, Siemens, Tellabs, T-pack and WorldWide Packets.
This MEF 14 certification ensures conformance to guidelines for the formulation of SLAs. MEF 14 covers two sets of MEF service attributes – service performance and bandwidth profiles. The first set comprises three attributes relating to the Ethernet Virtual Circuits, including frame delay, frame delay variation and frame loss ratio. The second set relates to the User Network Interface and includes four attributes: committed information rate, committed burst size, excess information rate and excess burst size.
Iometrix performed the conformance testing.
Metro Ethernet Forum www.MetroEthernetForum.org
