Nortel Promotes Provider Backbone Transport Technology

Nortel on Tuesday introduced Provider Backbone Transport technology – chief among several enhancements to its carrier-grade metro Ethernet product line.

The announcement follows the company’s May 16 creation of the Metro Ethernet Networks business unit address carrier demand for Ethernet networks that can handle bandwidth-hungry video applications.

PBT is a point-to-point tunneling technology that enables service providers to specify the path that an Ethernet service should take across the network. It allows for QoS guarantees by reserving bandwidth for real-time services and it provides for 50ms service recovery times should a connection fail. Together, these characteristics are designed to support live video and broadcast, multimedia, broadband data and voice services.

”We believe we are first to market with PBT,” said Philippe Morin, who has been named president of the new Metro Ethernet Networks division for Nortel. PBT is available today in Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 and soon will be integrated into its Optical Multiservice Edge 6500 and other Ethernet-ready platforms.

In addition, Nortel is lobbying the standards bodies in another effort to drum up additional support for PBT as a metro Ethernet technology.

As endorsements for the PBT approach, Morin cites concerns expressed by BT that the more popular approach – MPLS from core to edge – doesn’t scale. “They have issued an RFP for extended native Ethernet because it’s more cost-effective,” he said.

PBT helps Ethernet scale by conserving network resources that would otherwise be taken up by the constant communications between large numbers of Ethernet devices in the network.

In addition, when PBT is paired with Provider Backbone Bridging – another pending standard known as IEEE 802.1ah – Ethernet services can be scaled to millions of users per metro area. An early implementation of PBB has been available on Nortel's metro Ethernet portfolio for several years, and a fully standardized version will be delivered later this year as the standard is ratified.

Among the other enhancements to its Ethernet product line, Nortel announced it has integrated RPR into OME 6500 optical platform. It also introduced a new 10gigE line card for the Optical Metro 5200 that enables the transport up to 175km without the need for regeneration or dispersion compensation. Finally, the manufacturer is supporting new Ethernet OAM standards across its portfolio.

Nortel Networks www.nortel.com

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