Equinix eases Ethernet handoffs, opens doors to US market

Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX) is allowing carriers to hand off Ethernet services to one another much more easily and rapidly than they have before, making it much easier for carriers outside the US, in particular, to offer new Ethernet services here.

The company is launching carrier Ethernet exchanges in four initial markets this year -- London, Silicon Valley, Chicago and Washington, DC – with plans to expand it to all of its 18 markets within the next few years.

The service would allow carriers to interconnect a single carrier Ethernet service – anything from a T-1 to a 10-Gb/s link – to multiple other carriers uniformly in one fell swoop. Carriers have been interconnecting their carrier Ethernet services for years (see this story for more background), but in order to preserve the characteristics of those services from one network to the next, they have to sit down and mutually agree to them, which can take months or even years, just to establish one connection. Equinix is offering to do multiple interconnections within in a day or two.

“It’s very disruptive,” said Jarrett Appleby, the company’s chief marketing officer.

The Metro Ethernet Forum, upon whose definitions Equinix’s offering is based, has been working on a uniform interconnection specification for years: the external network-to-network interface, or E-NNI. That effort has been repeatedly delayed, and Appleby doesn’t expect it to be complete until the end of next year at the earliest, but he believes it’s unlikely to change much in that time, allowing providers to go to market with implementations today.

“The standards weren’t far enough along until very recently,” Appleby said. “It’s at a point now where everyone feels comfortable we can use it.”

Equinix is using Alcatel-Lucent’s 7450 Ethernet service switches along with its own templates for mapping services from one network to the next. For example, some carriers might have six classes of service for their Ethernet offerings, while others may have three or four. Equinix translates one into another to preserve service classes as closely as possible.

The service will be especially valuable to carriers outside the US looking to penetrate the carrier Ethernet services market here.

“If a carrier doesn’t have a global footprint in the US and is relying on other partners [to offer services], it’s very powerful,” Appleby said. “The initial focus is on the US, but if we do at least two [exchanges] per region, it will enable US folks to reach globally as well.”