From a supplier perspective, it's clear why mobile backhaul gets so much attention: it's a significant new market with highly-concentrated buyer base. For many of the same reasons, optical Ethernet is getting a boost in the backhaul market.

 

"Mobile backhaul offers a single sale representing 200, 500 or a couple thousand towers in a metro area," says Fred Ellefson, vice president of global marketing for ADVA (News - Alert) Optical Networking. For the same reason, the mobile backhaul market is attractive for providers of optical Ethernet access systems.

 

"Business Ethernet customers buy on a sort of one-sy, two-sy, five to 10 sites basis, but mobile backhaul sales are on a scale of hundreds to thousands or more," says Ellefson.

 

One notable change that is coming: performance management and housekeeping capabilities on a par with Synchronous Optical Networking (SONET). For a connectionless protocol such as Ethernet, that's a big deal, in the carrier world, as it eliminates one historic objection network engineers have had.

 

"One of the big trends we see is that Ethernet was a best effort service and now it is carrier grade," says Ellefson. "Over next five years it will turn into a transport infrastructure with all the service level agreements, protection switching, connection-oriented performance people expect from SONET."

 

Ethernet, in other words, is going to look like a SONET transport layer. It will support “pseudo-wire”, T1s, T3s, OC3s and OC12s, Ellefson says. "It will look an awful lot like SONET."

 

In fact, some might argue that Ethernet is becoming the next SONET.