Lack of awareness is stifling Ethernet adoption

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Ethernet is growing at a very rapid rate in the business space but awareness of the technology is still preventing it taking hold of many markets.

This was the belief of Kevin Vachon, chief operating officer of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), who claimed eyes needed to be opened across the globe to this technology.

“There are countries where the competitive pressures are such that [companies] are not aggressively pursuing these new service development initiatives [with] China as an example,” he said when IT PRO spoke with him at this year's NetEvents in Istanbul.

“The markets aren't aware of Ethernet in general [and] the service providers with the regulatory environment are not forced to move too quickly. We have seen that in other places like Germany, so I think that is probably the big issue.”

The Ethernet evangelist was keen to sing the praises of the technology, citing research which claimed the market would reach the $40 billion mark by 2014 – it is at $20 billion today – and highlighting benefits such as cost reduction, simplicity, scalability, speed and performance.

But it won't be him that turns the tide, according to Vachon. It will be down to the smaller players in the Ethernet space to bring about the change.

“We do see [things] like this little company in Norway that just won an award as an example of a country that is small [but] is aggressively pursuing Ethernet,” he added.

“We can probably expect this is going to change when these small guys come in and create noise in the market.”

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