I’ve had a number of conversations over the last few weeks with large European Carriers (Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom, TeliaSonera, etc…). I was speaking, specifically, with their International Networking divisions. As a person who is constantly looking for Market information, this is a very good place to ask as these divisions touch so many customers, Service Providers and other Carriers simultaneously.
There are a few commonalities between all of these International arms of National Carriers; They provide services globally, they have very limited physical infrastructure, they are all offering multiservice Ethernet connections and none of them are in a hurry to move off of SONET/SDH as an access medium.
If you’re a bit gobsmacked, I understand….I was too 
. I was convinced that everyone was hoping to be rid of SONET/SDH as soon as possible.
After asking them a few questions about it, their position and necessity for this family of Metro technologies was clearly understandable. All of these divisions are not nearly as large as we tend to think they are. They have much fewer Operations, Installation and Administration personnel than we would be led to believe by their sheer market reach. SONET/SDH allows for a standardized interconnection at all of their local interconnection points. If you want a more technical explanation of what SONET/SDH is then please check out these links on SONET and SDH
If you think about it for a second it makes total sense. They have a skeleton crew when we consider their manpower vs. the market they have to serve and synchronous transport beats “cloud” technologies hands down in the troubleshooting arena. One of my contacts at KPN said it best when she said:
“SONET/SDH is everywhere, it’s universally understood, it’s not too much of an issue to transport Ethernet and best of all it’s cheap! Why wouldn’t we use it?”
All of these carriers offer multi-service Ethernet connections and the prevalence of IP based services is starting to cause headaches though. It is a well known fact that IP based quality of service (QoS) tends to get broken when it’s transported over a SDH/SONET network. This point isn’t lost on the Engineers at these companies and they are now looking quite a bit at Ethernet technologies that provide some sort of service continuity assurance.
Another common theme of these Divisions is that they would all love to move to an Ethernet based architecture and they are now determining how to do so. One of the more discussed ideas is to build a parallel metro interconnection based on Ethernet in the largest sites and slowly, but surely, migrate over most customers in the first year.
Are you seeing this too? Please comment below!
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I had to smile … is this really a surprise? Ever wondered if we "packet" and/or "IP" people have a tunnel view? Whom are we talking to? Likely other Ethernet or IP people. And the particular vendors we talk to have a strong interest to spin the story as well.
Since I'm in business I got told "voice is dead", i.e. the traditional voice TDM services and technology. But companies I know always made money with TDM voice, though the margin gets smaller and smaller. Just another example of "must have" new technologies and the reality.
There is nothing wrong with Ethernet or IP but we have forgotten how brilliant Sonet/SDH or ATM is engineered. When a guarantee was really guaranteed and not a (weak) statistical or purely marketing statement.
Btw, when my company is asking customers in North America or Europe for access interface forecasts then it's surprisingly often T1/E1, T3/E3 (sure, aggregated into channelized STM-x).
Marc
Over the years I have learned that for any company to be successful in technology one must adopt the product set like one would adopt a child. Eat, drink, sleep the product and the basic unique value of the product…..or Marc, in your words "tunnel view"
It's what quite a few Tech Industry employees call "Drinking the Kool Aid" of their particular company.
Unfortunately this "kool-aid" mentality tends to eclipse the customers needs at times, exactly as it did with me. I was just as surprised as anyone that someone wanted SDH/SONET to stick around for the forseeable future
My company (Network Mining) is doing audits for carriers, predominantly transport (and within transport : SDH/SONET). I can only confirm the above: the installed base is huge, depreciated, easy to operate with limited staff, and … difficult/expensive to switch off or migrate.