Media Coverage

PBT: New Kid on the Metro Block

By Tim Hills

PBT is one of the latest must-have telecom monograms, although the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) 802 Standards Committee – ever one for snappy monikers – seems determined to weary every journalist’s fingers by renaming it PBB-TE. But even that can’t stop Provider Backbone Transport technology from making waves in the press and definite ripples among service providers and their suppliers.

And they increasingly look to be more than ripples, following BT Group PLC's well publicized endorsement in mid 2006 of the technology in its massive next-generation network project, the 21CN, and growing industry support for a standard.

So a good round 60 percent of service-provider respondents to a poll in the Light Reading Webinar on which this report is based said they would consider using PBT for two or more of the following metro applications: business E-line or E-LAN services, residential triple-play services, and wireless backhaul.

But uncertainty abounds. Only about a quarter of the respondents thought that PBT could replace Sonet/SDH equipment or enhance carrier Ethernet with traffic-engineering capabilities; and only 40 percent thought it would be cheaper than the current favorite technology for converged metro networks –MPLS.

Certainly, PBT’s protagonists are promising good things from the technology. In particular, they say that:

• PBT provides an opportunity to radically "de-layer" the metro.

• It eliminates concerns about Ethernet viability in carrier networks.

• It equips Ethernet to step up to a bigger role in the network.

• It appears to have capex and opex advantages that make it attractive to some carriers.

Ken Davison, VP of Marketing and Business Development for Meriton Networks is quoted throughout the report. To read the rest of the report, click on http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=115612