More and more, critical communications services, such as wireless mobile back-haul, are being delivered using Ethernet. Ethernet offers bandwidth and flexibility at an affordable price. But as its deployment grows, how can customers and service providers assure these services are performing as expected over time? Standard organizations have developed conformance procedures to address this. However, they are sometimes difficult and cumbersome to implement as part of installation and maintenance processes. In this white paper, we will describe alternative techniques, based on industry standard RFC2544, that offer the potential to automate and streamline conformance testing to reduce cycle time, cost and complexity.