Singapore, 19 Nov, 2009: CENX, Inc (Carrier Ethernet Neutral Exchange) announced its first three Carrier Ethernet Exchanges in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles respectively – also the world's first Ethernet exchanges -  at the Net Events Asia Pacific Press Summit here today.

Whilst Internet exchanges are failrly common, Carrier Ethernet Exchanges serve as hubs enabling the interconnection mostly of telcos worldwide through a single connection to the exchange, rather than multiple cross connections between telcos and telcos, which was costly and take too long to install.

Over the past eight years, the CENX team had lead in defining Carrier Ethernet, develop Carrier Ethernet standards, implement and market strategies within the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) www.MetroEthernetForum.org, an international industry association comprised of 156 member companies, including 60 service providers. The rest comprise equipment vendors, semiconductor chip manufacturers, software companies, testing labs and others.

Telekom Malaysia, currently is the only Malaysian telco which is a member of the MEF and whilst MEF is a non-profit industry association, CENX is a commercial operation and a member of the MEF.

“CENX created the first services of its kind which simplify and streamline Carrier Ethernet interconnection via the easy to use, graphic-driven CENX Market powered by the CENX system – a resilient, distributed, highly integrated, system consisting of hardware, switching and transport, as well as software backend and applications,” said Nan Chen, CENX president and chief executive officer, as well as MEF founding president.

The key difference between a regular data-based Ethernet system and Carrier Ethernet is that the latter must be able to meet high quality of service, high-speed, low latency, guaranteed service levels, high availability and reliability, interconnection between large numbers of virtual servers, real-time portal & management. It supports both standard Ethernet frame ssizes, as well and emerging jumbo frames suitable for very large data transfers, such as to and from data centres.

“Our goal is to accelerate our service provider members' revenue , whilst providing significant savings in terms of cost and time to make Carrier Ethernet available widely worldwide.” said Chen.

CENX plans to install more Carrier Ethernet Exchanges in other parts of the world and Chen hopes that most members of the MEF will eventually become its customers.