By David Gross
With LightReading's Ethernet Expo taking place today and tomorrow, I expected Carrier Ethernet Exchange news to burn the press wire this week, and CENX and AboveNet have not disappointed. CENX announced that it has reached 15 million ESLs, or Ethernet Service Locations, on its network. In order to reach such a high number, they are likely counting computers located in buildings where their member carriers provide Ethernet service. They announced that they had reached 10 million in June.
Additionally, AboveNet announced that it is launching its Ethernet eXchange Hub for carriers that want to reach customers through its network, and that it will be co-located at both CENX and Equinix Carrier Ethernet locations in major markets, such as New York, Chicago, London, Washington, and San Francisco. The company already offers standard Ethernet Exchange services in these large markets, but the Ethernet eXchange Hub will allow carriers to offer AboveNet services to their customers, not just to interconnect with the provider, which they can do now. This new service will be available next quarter.
Actually David, your assumption is not correct. This is not an aggregation of the number of reachable computers. The term Ethernet Service Location (ESL) is defined as: “an Ethernet serviceable physical location/address”, readily searchable, for example, via the CENX Market application. This is typically the service providers' demarcation point(s) and would usually be connected to an end-users' Ethernet LAN on which one, or more likely many, end-user computers are connected. An ESL, therefore, does not mean the actual number of end-user computers accessible nor even the number of reachable companies if the ESL is in a multi-tenant location. The actual number of computers reachable is therefore larger than the number of ESLs. I hope that this short overview clarifies the issue, made public when the previous CENX milestones were reached this year, as you mention above.
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