Patent ID: 8756344

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a carrier-neutral Ethernet exchanger coupled to two or more private Ethernet networks of participating carriers to enable the two or more private Ethernet networks to be interconnected at a common point, the two or more private Ethernet networks including a first private Ethernet network associated with a first Ethernet frame type of a first Ethernet protocol and a second private Ethernet network associated with a second Ethernet frame type of a second Ethernet protocol, wherein frames from the first private Ethernet network are received, translated from the first Ethernet protocol to the second Ethernet protocol, and transmitted by the Ethernet exchanger to the second private Ethernet network, wherein frame translation performed by the Ethernet exchanger is based on a first profile associated with the first private Ethernet network and a second profile associated with the second private Ethernet network, the first profile and the second profile stored in a relational database associated with the Ethernet exchanger, the first profile and the second profile established based on information received from a first participating carrier associated with the first private Ethernet network and from a second participating carrier associated with the second private Ethernet network respectively using an online web portal which is hosted on a server cooperating with the Ethernet exchanger; wherein the online web portal is configured to present web pages and templates to a browser application on a client machine to solicit the information from the participating carriers, where the templates are configured to enable the participating carriers to create profile information and provide other information about their private Ethernet networks, wherein the profile information provided by the participating carriers is configured to be extracted automatically from the templates via a first extraction routine, which then stores the profile information in the relational database associated with the Ethernet exchanger; wherein the Ethernet exchanger includes a configuration module configured to qualify the participating carriers, enable the participating carriers to search for other participating carriers and their services, buy and sell services to the other participating carriers, and provide bandwidth translation and Quality of Service (QoS) mapping; and wherein components of the apparatus are implemented in hardware, software, or a combination of both, and where components of the apparatus implemented in the software are stored in an executable format on one or more non-transitory machine-readable mediums.