Mid-Band Ethernet

That's a great question! It's important to know the difference between Mid-Band Ethernet and these more traditional services, so that the benefits of this newer technology can be truly understood.

We'll first look at the comparison between Mid-Band Ethernet and ADSL. ADSL is a wonderful and incredibly popular residential service - it provides a great way to serve the needs of the residential user by maximizing downstream performance and limiting upstream performance. It's perfect for surfing the web and downloading music or games.

Unfortunately, that's not what most businesses need. I don't know about you, but in my business, our job is to create information - perform sales contacts, send presentations, emails, create white papers, transfer brochures, etc. Business need to be producers of data, not consumers of data. This means that the minimal upstream capacity of ADSL is generally insufficient for business applications. Mid-Band Ethernet is a symmetric technology, providing equal bandwidth in both the upstream and downstream directions, and is much more suited to the business environment.

When comparing to traditional T1/E1 services, the most important differentiators are bandwidth and cost. Mid-Band Ethernet can deliver over 7 times the bandwidth of a T1 over the same infrastructure. T1s come in a rigid 1.5 Mbps scale, while Mid-Band Ethernet can offer a variety of flexible bandwidths. Some carriers are offering Mid-Band Ethernet services beyond 40 Mbps, and in flexible increments from 2 Mbps and beyond! It is clear that existing T1 & E1 technologies cannot meet these flexible and growing bandwidth demands.

Another big difference is reliability. Mid-Band Ethernet, as described in an early Q&A here on "Ask the Expert", is much more reliable than traditional services such as ADSL. Reliability is another cornerstone of the business application, and another key differentiator from both ADSL and T1/E1 services.

One final key thing to remember is that Mid-Band Ethernet is Ethernet - it offers the efficiency, simplicity, and flexibility of Ethernet services. Mid-Band Ethernet is based on 2BASE-TL, an IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard. Although one may be able to layer Ethernet on top of these other technologies, they are not offer native Ethernet services, and instead offer greater inefficiency and complexity by layering Ethernet on top of some other layer.