In the space of just over 10 years, Carrier Ethernet has evolved into a $20 billion global industry. Alex Hawkes talks to CENX and MEF president Nan Chen – a key figure throughout the Carrier Ethernet revolution and a pioneer of the Carrier Ethernet exchange.
During the 1990s, 10Mbps, 100Mbps and 1,000Mbps Ethernet was flourishing in enterprise and consumer markets. Network hardware vendors such as Bay Networks had been working tirelessly to create new Ethernet products based upon ever faster 10Gbps Ethernet. Although not well understood at the time, it was this new Ethernet technology which was destined to revolutionise the carrier market.
The company was sold to Nortel in the summer of 1998 for $9.1 billion, but one of its employees was to go on and play a pivotal role in what came next. “We had developed a new technology and the next stage was figuring out how the industry can implement it,” says Nan Chen, president of both CENX and the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). “We quickly realised that the metro networks which were operated by Tier 1 service providers were where this technology needed to be.”
In hindsight, this...
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