Each year, the Metro Ethernet Forum presents awards for the best products, individuals and providers in the Ethernet industry. This year they were handed out at the first-ever GEN14 conference attended by many industry experts, analysts, Ethernet visionaries and service providers.

I attended the Ethernet Excellence Awards dinner in the Washington D.C. area and Comcast Business had another banner showing, bringing home four awards, including:

  • Best Product/Service of the Year in North America

  • Best Application of the Year in Health (for our deployment with Cooper University Health Care)

  • Best Application of the Year in Government (for our deployment with the Cumberland County Library System)

  • Ethernet Industry Person of the Year 

These awards are a testament to the incredible dedication and innovative thinking that our entire Comcast Business team brings to their job every day – from our folks here at HQ, to the engineers in our NOCs to the technicians out in the field who are expanding our fiber network to new business locations and everyone else in between.

We’re leaning in on our Ethernet product for good reason. According to Vertical Systems Group, the U.S. Ethernet market will surpass one million customer ports by 2018. This is a result of more enterprises, mid-market customers and small businesses moving to Ethernet due to expanding service options, competitive pricing and rising bandwidth demand.

We are seeing rising demand from businesses of all sizes and across diverse industries, including recent deployments with Inn Marin outside of San Francisco, the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and Jordan’s Furniture, an iconic New England retailer and Berkshire Hathaway company.

A big part of Ethernet’s accelerating growth is the work of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), the global standards body responsible for defining the future of Ethernet. We recognize the value of industry collaboration and participate extensively as an MEF Board member as well as co-chairing the Service Operations Committee. As a top provider of Ethernet services, we were also the first service provider to earn the MEF Carrier Ethernet 2.0 certification back in 2013.

On behalf of all Comcast Business employees, we accept these four awards, thank the Metro Ethernet Forum for their industry leadership, and look forward to another great year in 2015.