Meriton Networks | Media Coverage

Meriton Networks | Media Coverage http://www.meriton.com/news/media.php Media Coverage en-ca Copyright Meriton Networks Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:59:04 -0500 The Path Less Traveled: A New Method for Optical Ethernet Transport Though the consensus of most major carriers has for some time seemed congealed around IP and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) technologies as the basis for Layer 3 core networks, a small but growing group of vendors is trumpeting a Layer 2 technology, Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) as an alternative to MPLS for certain applications. One of those vendors, Meriton Networks, is taking things a step further, using PBT to challenge another widely accepted notion: the presumed convergence of transport and service delivery networks. In many optical transport networks, Meriton explained, traffic is forced to make frequent pit stops along the way. Wavelength-division multiplexers (WDMs) pool together lots of traffic from a variety of different services to efficiently ship them along as gigabit Ethernet (GigE) circuits. But the distinct services within the GigE pipes of the WDM network have a range of different destinations. So the GigE pipes are occasionally pulled out of the WDM network (usually at an add/drop multiplexer, or ADM) and cabled a few feet away to an Ethernet switch or router, which takes a deeper look inside the signal to see which services need to go where. Much of that traffic then goes through another cable back to the ADM. This ducking into and out of the service delivery network--sometimes called "tromboning," or "hair-pinning"--is what Meriton hopes to reduce. "You're using two client interfaces on two different ADMs and two client interfaces on the service delivery switch just to switch the GigE across the [central office] to move it across the network," said Ken Davison, Meriton's vice president of marketing and business development. "That's a lot of client interfaces just to do switching. You're paying for an overlay you don't want. We said, 'That doesn't make sense." Meriton's approach is to keep the transport and service delivery parts of the network as separate as possible. Its newest products create "tunnels" of dedicated bandwidth in the transport network for traffic to follow, moving head-down through the network as services, undisturbed until it resurfaces on the other side of the tunnel. So instead of blindly pulling traffic out of the transport network in big pipes for the service delivery network to sort through and switch, the transport network would switch those service tunnels intelligently. Today's traffic enters the network as virtual local access networks (VLANs, tagged for identification as a particular service), and under Meriton's plan, those VLANs are tagged again to allow them to flow quickly through the transport tunnel without making pit stops in the service delivery network along the way. An upcoming version of Meriton's 7200 optical switching platform, available in the second half of this year, uses PBT technology--a Layer 2 technology, like Ethernet--to provision those transport tunnels. A subsequent version of the product will support transport-MPLS, which addresses some of MPLS's complexity for transport networks. "That really ties [Meriton's] fortunes to the willingness of carriers to adopt the [PBT] approach in the near term," said Jason Marcheck, Current Analysis analyst. "A lot, if not most, of the market is still more comfortable with MPLS at this point." PBT has gained more attention since British Telecom announced last year it would deploy the technology in equipment from Nortel Networks and Siemens. That gear applied PBT to metro Ethernet switches. Other vendors followed, promising PBT plans of their own, including Extreme Networks and Hammerhead Systems. Earlier this year, core router vendor Avici Systems announced work on software that would use PBT to create what it calls a "virtual control plane"--in essence decoupling the network control plane from the hardware network elements to make the control plane more dynamically malleable. As a well-entrenched supplier of MPLS technology, Cisco Systems is not only touting the benefits of that technology over PBT, it is trumpeting the charge toward convergence of optical and IP networks while Meriton is vowing to keep them segregated. Cisco has been beating the drum ever harder this year that service providers need to resign themselves to the necessity of integrating optical and IP. "The unnecessary layers in the spaghetti need to be removed from the network," said David Ward, the architect of Cisco's CRS-1 core router, said during a panel discussion at this year's Optical Fiber Communications conference in March. Cisco introduced IP-over-dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) capabilities for its CRS-1 in late 2005, naming cable operator Comcast as a customer. Glenn Wellbrock, director of network technology development of Verizon Business, sees the inevitability of network convergence on the horizon but sees obstacles along the way as well. As for Cisco's proposition, he said, "The back-to-back portion of that, the gray interface [Cisco is] eliminating, is not the most expensive part. So it's a marginal cost savings, but it is beneficial in that it's fewer things to manage and spare." One of the challenges Wellbrock sees in integrating optical and routing is that the leading optical equipment vendors and the leading router vendors aren't the same folks. "The switch/router guys don't necessarily own the transport gear," he said. "So then you have to operate it in what's called an alien wavelength, which means the transport system is just accepting a signal it knows nothing about necessarily. It can do power management on it, but it can't do the same type of controls it would have over its own wavelength, so the performance is a bit limited." Another potential barrier to optical/IP integration is that those functions are typically managed by different personnel groups in big carriers. The cultural differences between them have their roots in an old tug-of-war between telecom's past and its future, sometimes described as the friction between "Bell heads" and "Net heads." To Meriton, it's one more reason to keep transport and service networks separate: it's what carriers do today. But it won't be forever, Wellbrock said. "[Optical and routing] are managed by different teams," he said. "Will we overcome that stuff as carriers? Yeah. It's a matter of survival and being competitive. Convergence is changing a lot of the way we do business." As for Meriton's proposal, Wellbrock isn't religious. Whether it's MPLS or PBT, Layer 2 or Layer 3, the most important feature is the bottom line, and the same questions apply. "Is it more cost effective to do it that way?" he said. "Then we're interested in doing it. But you can't charge a premium for doing it that way. It has to be a lower-cost overall solution." http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=126 Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 What\'s New in Carrier Ethernet Transport? The popularity of Ethernet continues to snowball. The technology, which made its mark in local area networks years ago, since has caught on both as a business service and as an access technology to carry a wide variety of services on carrier networks - pushed along by its attractive price points and scalability. That and the growing number of IP applications on the network have created a shift of epic proportions in the telecom industry, which grew up in a very controlled environment based on static, connection-oriented technologies. Now Ethernet appears poised to make its mark on the transport part of carrier networks, challenging such entrenched technologies as SONET and even MPLS, and creating what some see as new equipment categories. For example, Meriton Networks earlier this year announced its entry into what it calls "the emerging carrier Ethernet transport market" by marrying Ethernet and WDM in its 7200 OSP (Optical Switching Platform), an integrated switching and transport system. This solution addresses two key trends evident in metro networking today, according to Ken Davison, vice president of marketing and business development at Meriton. The first trend is that Tier 1 service providers are trying to drive down network costs and enable new services by consolidating multiple networks on an IP service delivery platform and putting all that over new transport architectures. The second is that investment in SONET and SDH (which Meriton believes will remain as a client interface) is being phased out in favor of other transport architectures. Meriton believes WDM and optical transport layer (OTN), the switching capability associated with WDM, will be the transport architectures of choice going forward. As a result, Meriton says carriers will be able to reduce metro "headend" (gigE) port consumption significantly, and reduce the requirement for a separate Layer 2 aggregation platform between the optical and packet layers. By keeping the switching in the optical domain, carriers can achieve a deterministic QoS, low-latency, low-jitter approach for switching carrier Ethernet traffic. Additionally, keeping traffic in the optical transport domain wherever possible minimizes tributary handoff and the number of Layer 2/Layer 3 hops. It also allows for end-to-end path management of individual gigE optical paths, with point-and-click provisioning, protection, and bridge-and-roll functionality, while optimizing fiber usage, the company says. Phase one of Meriton's plan will enable carriers to support gigE networking within the metro using sub-wavelength switching and grooming of nine gigabit Ethernet streams onto a 10gbps wavelength. The capability of switching a gigE path within the optical transport layer and maintaining the path throughout the entire network and assuring it with an SLA makes it ideal for wholesale interconnect services, according to Meriton. During phase two of Meriton's carrier Ethernet transport equipment rollout, the company expects to introduce support for Carrier Ethernet tunnel switching and aggregation for local handoff. PBT, or provider backbone transport, will be the first Ethernet tunnel technology to be supported by Meriton. PBT, which xchange wrote about in its February issue, is expected to have a significant impact on the transport transformation discussion in its own right. It currently is undergoing ratification within the IEEE, under the proposed name of provider backbone bridging - traffic engineering (PBB-TE). Both phases will be available in Meriton's 7200 OSP in the second half of 2007. Ciena Corp. also recently addressed what's happening with metro transport with some new product and architecture announcements. The company has introduced two new products, a road map for its existing transport and switching series line, and its Ethernet vision for FlexSelect. FlexSelect is the architecture Ciena introduced in 2005, but now the company is integrating packet transport directly into that and extending the solution to the customer premises and the service edge, says Mitch Auster, senior director of service provider solutions marketing at Ciena. "This is driven by a recognition, which maybe comes from service providers that have been deploying Ethernet for the longest, that service providers are reaching a point where they can't scale the network from a manageability perspective and maintain the profitability they need. So they need to converge services on one network," says Auster. The new solutions from Ciena will allow carriers to use their metro networks to aggregate traffic to fewer, higher-speed connections; use every bit of their wavelength flexibility; use connection-oriented Ethernet so they can pack as many services as possible into the transport layer without overburdening it; and avoid sending traffic through multiple packet engines, instead doing packet aggregation and switching at intermediate offices. Ciena studies show that this approach can lower carrier ownership costs by up to a third, according to Auster. The alternative, he says, is continuing to try to scale Ethernet over SONET, or deploying IP MPLS routers and directly connecting them with WDM, which Auster says Ciena believes is too complicated. Cisco Systems Inc.'s Ian Hood, marketing manager for service provider solutions, says that: "At the moment, in the aggregation network, people are using IP over MPLS because the traffic is not as well known. That's now the best way to go based on current equipment and standards. But going forward, there may be a move to Ethernet over WDM or Ethernet transport over MPLS - which we already do now - with other technologies as they come along." However, adds Hood, there are still open questions about how to handle redundancy, scaling, and unicast and multicast traffic requirements in these newer transport scenarios. "The Cisco model, I believe, is very focused, of course, on routing - intelligent routing," says Erin Dunne, director of research for research firm Vertical Systems Group Inc. "Whereas the Etherent - direct Ethernet over the optical transport, such as a Meriton would be doing - would be eliminating [the need for] some of the intelligence in the routers because you would have intelligent switches, which in [Meriton's] eyes is better, faster and cheaper." Of course, today's transport layer includes a lot of SONET, WDM and MPLS, she adds. "It is early on in this debate, but you're talking about some religious warfare here - big carriers versus small carriers, MPLS versus not, SONET versus not, do you want to go with the Cisco model or the carrier Ethernet overlay model? There are pros and cons to each one." Khali Henderson contributed to this story. http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=125 Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400 Riding the Wave Fast forward to 2007, and Ethernet is ready to ride a new wave as a transport mechanism.CET (Carrier Ethernet transport) combines the cost efficiency of Ethernet, the reliability of WDM and traditional SONET/SDH to deliver flexibility, efficiency and cost savings to network interconnections. Then CET combines agile optics with Ethernet tunnel technologies such as PBB-TE (provider backbone bridging: traffic engineering) or T-MPLS (transport MPLS). What's driving this trend? Service providers are looking to leverage Ethernet's cost efficiency with the resiliency of traditional SONET/SDH networks for wireless backhaul, DSLAM backhaul, and wholesale bandwidth applications. Still, there's a lot of work to be done. "Ethernet's come a long way, but SONET/SDH networks provide a well-understood suite of network monitoring and control functions that Carrier Ethernet is just starting to deliver on," said Jason Marcheck, principal optical analyst for Current Analysis. "Add to this the increasing demands that sophisticated services like VLANs, IP video, etc., place on OAM, and it becomes a complex solution. It means that CET solutions have to deliver the cost-effective scalability of Ethernet with the network control and monitoring features of SONET/SDH. Things like PBT and end-to-end IP/MPLS are what vendors are starting to [rely on] to provide these network control features." <h4>PBT/PBB-TE Captures Hearts, Headlines</h4> One part of the new CET movement gaining the most headlines is the emerging PBT/PBB-TE standard effort. PBT (provider backbone transport), which will be standardized in the IEEE as PBB-TE, provides various enhancements to make Ethernet more deterministic in nature. PBB-TE can bring control to data paths within a large carrier network, enabling QoS and the ability to set aside specific paths for specific traffic types. Providing a connection-oriented transport mechanism, PBT utilizes the existing IEEE's 802.1ah standard PBB format for scaling and layering. What's more, PBB-TE brings the connection-oriented characteristics and deterministic behavior of SONET/SDH to Ethernet. PBB-TE achieves this by disabling the concept of flooding/broadcasting and spanning tree protocol, enabling it to act like a traditional carrier transport technology. "The basic advantage of PBT/PBB-TE is cost," said Michael Howard, principal analyst for service provider optical, routing and metro Ethernet at Infonetics Research. "If you can keep all of the transport at Layer 2, you have to buy Ethernet switches; you don't have to buy routers. PBT allows you to build a total Layer-2 transport network with no routing. That and the operational simplicity are the benefits of PBT vs. using MPLS." On the vendor side, the PBB-TE drive is coming from two angles: traditional optical vendors and Ethernet switching vendors. In addition to Nortel-one of the most vocal proponents of PBB-TE-Avici, Extreme Networks, Meriton Networks, Siemens and World Wide Packets have marshaled support for PBB-TE. With much of the initial push around new CET formats coming from the vendor community, it's clear there's yet no winning approach. Complementing the PBT/PBB-TE movement is Avici's Soapstone solution. Poised as a virtual control plane for PBT, the Soapstone Provider Backbone Transport Controller can help smooth the service provider transition to PBT when ready. Juniper, Cisco and Atrica, however, have taken a more neutral approach to the CET debate. Atrica, which has been offering connection-oriented Ethernet switches since 2000, feels as though the T-MPLS and PBT movements are quite complementary. "The five attributes of the MEF vision (i.e., scalability, protection, SLAs, TDM integration and service management) are complemented by PBT and T-MPLS," said Unmesh Kukreja, director of marketing for Atrica. "The bottom line is both PBT and T-MPLS, regardless of which one wins in the market, have started to go into this connection-oriented paradigm." <h4>MPLS Claims Early Lead</h4> For all that PBB-TE promises, support for T-MPLS is just as strong. T-MPLS is designed to simplify and enhance MPLS by enabling transport-focused packet solution. T-MPLS, based on the existing ITU-T G.805 layered transport architecture, supports Ethernet and legacy over client pseudowires. T-MPLS allows for end-to-end protected bi-directional LSPs in three ways: • By removing elements that disrupt OAM integrity (e.g., PHP, ECMP); • By adding OAM and switching functionality; and • By configuration and monitoring via network management. Proponents of T-MPLS, including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Fujitsu, argue that the T-MPLS approach, which provides simplified OAM&P processes, is farther along in the standards process, while PBT is just getting started. Still, many in the PBB-TE camp remain undaunted. Mick Reeve, an independent consultant and former chief architect on BT's 21CN, says the PBB-TE group can leverage similar elements adopted by T-MPLS. "In practice there's quite a bit of work to do, and transport-MPLS is ahead, but-and it's quite a big but-when you look what we have to do in both PBT and T-MPLS, there are some very minor tweaks to how the packets are routed," Reeve said. "The IEEE guys don't expect that to be a big piece of work. What is a big piece of work is working out operations and maintenance issues." <h4>The Optical Perspective</h4> But Ethernet switching is only one part of the equation. Optical vendors, including Alcatel, ADVA, Nortel, Siemens and newer vendors Foundry and Meriton, are also incorporating CET functionality into their platforms. Coming from the router perspective, Foundry Networks has integrated PoS (packet over SONET) interfaces on both its NetIron XMR Internet routers and NetIron MLX Series of metro routers. Meriton Networks, for one, has made a big move on PBB-TE via a CET product upgrade roadmap for its existing 7200 OSP platform. The vendor's two-phase strategy will enable carriers to support GigE networks via sub-wavelength switching and grooming of nine GigE streams and integrating Ethernet gateway tunnels (i.e., PBB-TE and T-MPLS) with intelligent WDM. "Carrier Ethernet transport is a very clean interface between the service layer and the transport layer," said Bill Gartner, Meriton COO. "As an Ethernet handoff between those two layers, the service layer can do its job, which is to manage the services and not have to have specific knowledge about the transport layer. What it needs to know is that it can get a service between point A and Z and the transport layer can provide that capability." Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., sees value in this approach. "The whole paradigm of networking changes if you commoditize the underlying property of the bit, and that's what we're doing with optics," he said. "What Meriton and others are saying is, if you can make Ethernet and lambdas almost philosophically interchangeable, then you can do all of your traffic engineering and all your high volume networking below IP where it can't be attacked, where it's not subject to [variability], and where its cost is lower." <h4>Service Providers Take Notice</h4> Even though it's still early in the game, service providers are paying attention. PBB-TE got a big boost last January when BT announced it would deploy PBT-enabled Siemens and Nortel Ethernet equipment in its 21CN network implementation. BT, which will use Nortel and Siemens Ethernet platforms to transport its residential and business service traffic, sees that the implementation of PBT will complement its 21CN MPLS strategy (see sidebar: BT's Ethernet Vision). Outside of BT, industry sources say Bell Canada and Verizon are also in favor of PBB-TE. Tom Bechley, director of enterprise network engineering for Verizon, while not saying it is committed to deploying PBT, is investigating its prospects. "From our perspective, we have already gone down a path and the problems proponents of PBT say they can solve are things we recognized all along and addressed them within the scope of current MPLS," he said. "You have to imagine vendors talk to us about this stuff, and we have been doing an exercise with PBT to see if there's any forward-looking value." If anything is certain in the emerging CET market (in whatever form it takes), service providers will be watching intently how Ethernet can provide them with a cost effective and flexible transport mechanism that has the same reliability as legacy circuit-based transport technologies. http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=127 Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400 PBT: New Kid on the Metro Block 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: <ul> <li> PBT provides an opportunity to radically "de-layer" the metro. </li> <li> It eliminates concerns about Ethernet viability in carrier networks. </li> <li> It equips Ethernet to step up to a bigger role in the network. </li> <li>It appears to have capex and opex advantages that make it attractive to some carriers.</li> </ul> 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 <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=115612">http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=115612</a> http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=128 Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400 PBB-TE Ups Ante on Ethernet Transport If there's anything to glean from the recent announcement that BT will deploy Siemens and Nortel Ethernet equipment in its 21CN network, besides being another win for Ethernet, it's proof that carriers are seeing value in the emerging IEEE standard for Ethernet transport, PBB-TE (Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering). PBB-TE, which provides enhancements to Ethernet known as PBT (Provider backbone transport), can bring control to data paths within a large carrier network, enabling QoS and the ability to set aside specific paths for specific traffic types. PBT can bring the connection-oriented characteristics and deterministic behavior that carriers have grown accustomed to in legacy technologies such as SONET/SDH to Ethernet. PBT achieves this by disabling the concept of flooding/broadcasting and Spanning Tree Protocol, which enables it to act like a traditional carrier transport technology. BT, which will utilize the Nortel and Siemens Ethernet platforms to transport its residential and business service traffic, sees that the implementation of PBT will complement its 21CN MPLS strategy. "The basic advantage of PBT is cost," said Michael Howard, principal analyst for Infonetics. "If you can keep all of the transport at Layer 2, you have to have Ethernet switches; you don't have to buy routers. PBT allows you to build a total Layer 2 transport network with no routing. I think that and the operational simplicity are the benefits of PBT vs. using MPLS." While BT has been the foremost supporter of PBB-TE and PBT, industry sources say that both Bell Canada and Verizon are in favor of the PBB-TE. On the vendor side, the PBT/PBB-TE drive is coming from two angles: traditional optical vendors and Ethernet switching vendors. Along with Nortel-one of the most vocal proponents of PBB-TE-Cisco, Meriton Networks, Siemens and World Wide Packets have marshaled support for the emerging standard. Traditionally a provider of optical networking equipment, Meriton Networks, for one, has developed a product upgrade roadmap for Carrier Ethernet transport by enhancing its existing 7200 OSP. Meriton Networks' two-phase strategy will enable carriers to support GigE networks via sub-wavelength switching and grooming of nine GigE streams and integrating Ethernet gateway tunnels (i.e., PBB-TE and T-MPLS with intelligent WDM). "Carrier Ethernet transport is a very clean interface between the service layer and the transport layer," said Bill Gartner, Meriton's COO. "As an Ethernet handoff between those two layers, the service layer can do its job, which is to manage the services and not have to have specific knowledge about the transport layer. It needs to know that it can get a service between points A and Z, and the transport layer can provide that capability."Still, for all the momentum around PBB-TE, not everyone is on board. Alcatel-Lucent, for one, argues that the T-MPLS (transport-MPLS) approach, which provides simplified OAM&P processes, is farther along in the standards process, while the PBB-TE movement is just getting started. Despite that obstacle, Mick Reeve, an independent consultant and former chief architect on BT's 21 CN, says that the PBB-TE group can leverage similar elements adopted by the T-MPLS group. "The other area where T-MPLS is slightly ahead is the way that different sorts of services are mapped into MPLS, such as ATM, FR and Ethernet, but I think PBT can reuse that stuff," Reeve said. http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=129 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Product of the Month - Carrier Ethernet Transport from Meriton Networks Ethernet shares a long-established legacy in both the enterprise and service provider networks. In the enterprise, Ethernet is the networking protocol of choice to carry data and voice, and it continues to prove itself as a sound carrier-class service. At the same time, a trend is taking place to utilize Ethernet in the transport domain. Certainly, there's no shortage of approaches for Ethernet transport as IP over WDM (intelligent packet over optical transport) and Carrier Ethernet overlay (intelligent Ethernet over optical transport) have made progress in the market. Meriton Networks, however, argues the better approach is CET (Carrier Ethernet transport). As an architectural approach to build an Ethernet/optical transport infrastructure, Meriton's CET vision integrates Ethernet gateway/tunnels (e.g., PBT ((provider backbone transport) and PBB-TE ((provider backbone bridging-traffic engineering) with intelligent WDM (wavelength and sub-wavelength switching). PBB-TE, an emerging IEEE standard that incorporates PBT, can bring control to data paths within a large carrier network, enabling QoS and the ability to set aside specific paths for specific traffic types. PBT offers a set of enhancements that bring the connection-oriented characteristics and deterministic behavior to which carriers have grown accustomed in legacy technologies such as SONET/SDH to Ethernet. PBT achieves this by disabling the concept of flooding/broadcasting and Spanning Tree Protocol, which enables it to act like a traditional carrier transport technology. What should make service providers smile about Meriton Networks' CET strategy is that it does not require a forklift upgrade. Through the addition of enhancements to its existing flagship 7200 OSP platforms, service providers can take advantage of the benefits of CET in an evolutionary path. Meriton will offer its CET capabilities via a two-pronged product evolution. First, Meriton will add Ethernet wavelength and sub-wavelength switching to its existing 7200 OSP platform-all of which can be done on any port to any port basis. By doing so, carriers can support high-density GigE networking within the metro via sub-wavelength switching and grooming of nine GigE streams onto a 10-Gbps wavelength. Staying true to an evolutionary path, the OSP incorporates GFP (Generic Framing Protocol) to carry Ethernet over SONET and the ability to integrate into existing OSS/OAM systems. What's more, switching a GigE path within the optical transport layer and maintaining the path throughout the network with an SLA makes it a sound wholesale interconnect service play. Secondly, TPACK, a provider of carrier Ethernet technologies, will collaborate to build an optional IEG (intelligent Ethernet gateway) element for the 7200 OSP. Initially supporting the IEEE's PBB-TE standard via an optional component for Carrier Ethernet tunnel switching and aggregation for local traffic handoff, the new IEG will also offer a T-MPLS variant. Even though the standards around PBB-TE and PBT are still evolving, BT (21CN) has been a major advocate of the technology and Bell Canada and Verizon are eyeing it closely. "What we're seeing with CET is that, as carriers build out their incumbent territory transport architecture, it can take that Ethernet tunneling technology and embed it into the optical domain. This clearly articulates how an incumbent service provider can now offer a truly scalable transport architecture with clear lines of delineation between service and transport," said Ken Davison, vice president of marketing and business development for Meriton Networks. "We have gone from the hype of building an NGN to the reality of deployment, and now we're starting to see from the vendor community and standards bodies the ability to build an NGN transport architecture that can support these services as opposed to laying the services on an assumed transport architecture," he said. Overall, the claim Meriton is making with this product evolution is in a word "simplicity." Through CET, Meriton claims carriers can reduce GigE port consumption and reduce the need for a separate Layer 2 aggregation platform between the optical and packet layers. The promise is that by keeping the switching in the optical domain, carriers can achieve deterministic QoS, low-latency jitter approach for switching carrier Ethernet traffic. Michael Howard, principal analyst for Infonetics Research, believes that service providers will make their respective next-generation migrations over time and will want a transport layer that is Ethernet fused with WDM. "Meriton is at the center of the Carrier Ethernet transport concept and is headed in the right direction," Howard said. "They are one of the first optical vendors to talk about PBT in an optical platform." http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=124 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Meriton Tackles Ethernet Transport Optical equipment vendor Meriton Networks Inc. has unveiled a technical roadmap, dubbed Carrier Ethernet Transport (CET), that it says will simplify carrier data transport by integrating Ethernet tunnels and optical switching. (See <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=116283">Meriton Touts CET</a>.) Meriton's approach differs from the current alternative approaches of all-<a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=4430">IP</a> traffic over <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=3109">WDM</a>, favored by Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), and <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=4428">Ethernet</a> over optical, which is the Ethernet services approach standardized by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF). In the CET model, the Ethernet traffic is switched within the WDM transport layer in single Gigabit Ethernet streams. More on that later. The CET approach also provides the underlying infrastructure story that's currently missing from the ongoing <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/insider/">Provider Backbone Transport (PBT)</a> and Transport MPLS <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=5487">MPLS</a> (T-MPLS) debate. Meriton is one of the few companies that isn't pinning its flag to either of these approaches, as it looks to manage the traffic on a single box, its 320-Gbit/s 7200 OSP (Optical Switching Platform). (See <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=115143">PBT Gathers Support</a> and <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=114785">PBT's Ethernet Appeal</a>.) PBT support, though, is a Meriton priority, and understandably so. PBT's leading carrier supporter is <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/complink_redirect.asp?vl_id=858">BT Group plc</a> (NYSE: <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/quote.asp?Account=lightreading&Page=QUOTE&Ticker=BT">BT</a> - <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/boards/thread_view.asp?thread_topic=1&thread_key=BT&thread_title=BT"> message board</a>; London: BTA), and Meriton is already involved in BT's NGN (next-generation network) project, the 21CN, as a partner of <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/complink_redirect.asp?vl_id=9180">Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Ltd.</a> , one of BT's lead vendor partners. (See <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=114643">Nortel, Siemens Win PBT Deals at BT</a> and <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=73052">Fujitsu Shares Its 21CN Success</a>.) So Meriton's approach seems to be hitting a number of buttons, but is it a story that will resonate with carriers? "This is a pretty big deal... There is a huge global process at work to move beyond the Sonet/SDH MSPP to something more packet-friendly," says Scott Clavenna, chief analyst at <a href="http://www.heavyreading.com">Heavy Reading</a>. "Basically all packets are going to enter the network via an Ethernet interface, and in many cases travel through the access network over an Ethernet-based PON or carrier Ethernet infrastructure -- it follows that ultimately you'd want the transport network to be as 'Ethernet' as possible." Meriton's VP of marketing, Ken Davison, acknowledges that the development of the CET approach has been driven by the future requirements of large Tier 1 carrier NGNs, which will carry increasingly high volumes of Ethernet traffic generated by residential (IPTV, gaming, multimedia services) and enterprise customers. "The talk so far has been about Ethernet services -- the MEF has defined services, but has assumed an underlying transport layer," says Davison. "Ethernet needs to be supported in the transport layer," which in NGNs will be based on the <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/complink_redirect.asp?vl_id=7556">International Telecommunication Union (ITU)</a> 's OTN (Optical Transport Network) standards. "SDH/Sonet was developed to handle TDM traffic -- it's not up to the NGN task. SDH/Sonet will no longer be the underpinning transport mechanism in NGNs. WDM will fill that role," he adds. Meriton's belief is that the Carrier Ethernet Transport approach is best suited to NGNs because it is simple and operationally efficient, and that carriers will start adopting this approach within the next few years. Meriton has even placed a market value on CET: Based on broad carrier Ethernet equipment market projections from <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/complink_redirect.asp?vl_id=7385">Infonetics Research Inc.</a> , Meriton believes the market for CET infrastructure will be worth more than $2.3 billion in the 2007-2009 timeframe. Meriton's CET-based proposition will be implemented in two phases, both of which will be completed in the second half of this year, according to Davison. Phase 1: Switching GigE Wavelengths Meriton has developed a technique, which it is building into the 7200's switching fabric, that enables sub-wavelength switching -- that is, the switching of individual GigE streams that have been aggregated in a 10-GigE wavelength. Meriton says this can currently be achieved using equipment from other vendors, but only using multiple network elements, and not in an integrated architecture. Being able to switch GigE streams at the optical layer gives carriers an easy-to-manage, reliable, and cost-efficient way to deliver traffic from A to B with guaranteed service-level agreements (SLAs), claims Meriton. "One of the big challenges facing major, Tier 1 operators is switching Ethernet traffic at the edge of the network," says Davison. He adds that the all-IP approach doesn't scale well and requires significant over-provisioning, while in an overlay network the traffic is "hairpinned" between multiple ports housed in different network elements. Phase 2: Dealing With PBT & T-MPLS Meriton is developing what it calls an Intelligent Ethernet Gateway (IEG) to manage PBT and T-MPLS Ethernet tunnels, though PBT capabilities are being prioritized and will be available first. This product, which will be an optional element in the 7200 optical switch, "can terminate tunnels, switch the tunnels individually, or offload to an MPLS network," says Davison. Put another way, the IEG will act as a PBT/T-MPLS tunnel switch, but, says Meriton, it is not a Layer 3 Ethernet switch. The IEG will inspect the Ethernet tunnels and aggregate the tunnels that are carrying the same type of traffic, such as video, and which need to be switched to the same location. Meriton is building its IEG blade, which slots into the 7200, using technology from Danish vendor <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/complink_redirect.asp?vl_id=5882">Tpack A/S</a> . (See <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=116284">Meriton Uses Tpack</a>.) Heavy Reading's Clavenna points out that Meriton isn't the only one working on this idea. "[Carrier Ethernet Transport] is a good idea, but Meriton will undoubtedly face a lot of competition, first from <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/complink_redirect.asp?vl_id=3858">Nortel Networks Ltd.</a> (NYSE/Toronto: <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/quote.asp?Account=lightreading&Page=QUOTE&Ticker=NT">NT</a> - <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/boards/thread_view.asp?thread_topic=1&thread_key=NT&thread_title=NT"> message board</a>), then <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/complink_redirect.asp?vl_id=9705">Alcatel-Lucent</a> (NYSE: <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/quote.asp?Account=lightreading&Page=QUOTE&Ticker=ALU">ALU</a> - <a href="http://www.lightreading.com/boards/thread_view.asp?thread_topic=1&thread_key=ALU&thread_title=ALU"> message board</a>), and basically every other MSPP and metro DWDM vendor. So the market is a great opportunity, but crowded and full of hungry vendors." http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=122 Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Meriton Unveils Carrier Ethernet Transport Strategy Meriton Networks (search for <a href="http://lw.pennnet.com/search/search.cfm?searcharea=articles&keywords=Meriton%20Networks">Meriton Networks</a>) today announced its strategy for entering the Carrier Ethernet Transport (CET) market, which analysts forecast to be a multi-billion dollar market over the next three years. According to COO Bill Gartner, Meriton's decision to enter the CET market is a direct result of what he sees as the increasing ubiquity of Ethernet. "In our own business, GigE is becoming the new currency of exchange in the network," he notes. High-end applications like video-on-demand (VoD), video telephony, and gaming dramatically increase the bandwidth needs and service level requirements, and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) has emerged as the ideal transport mechanism for these applications, says Gartner. He predicts a "phasing out" of SONET/SDH--at least as the transport architecture--in favor of an Ethernet over WDM or OTN-type approach. <table width="322" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="middle" valign="top"> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> What is CET? CET, as defined by Meriton, is an architectural approach for building a scalable transport infrastructure for supporting Ethernet and the evolution to next-generation networks. It integrates Ethernet tunneling via Provider Backbone Transport (search for <a href="http://lw.pennnet.com/search/search.cfm?searcharea=articles&keywords=PBT">PBT</a>) or Transport MPLS (a subset of MPLS) into the intelligent WDM layer. "Basically," says Gartner, "you have a very flexible optical layer that includes switching capabilities at the wavelength and sub-wavelength layers. And you have just enough--and that's a key point--just enough Layer 2 capabilities to be able to provide an end-to-end Ethernet service, but not burden the optical layer or the transport layer with a lot of the Ethernet Layer 2 functions. You can think of it as a transport problem," he says. CET enables a separation of the service delivery architecture from the underlying transport architecture. By doing so, the transport network is transparent for service creation and modification (e.g. adds, moves and changes). In other words, the transport layer is responsible for transporting traffic from point A to point B; it provides end-to-end capabilities for Ethernet reminiscent of circuit-oriented capabilities of SONET/SDH. The optical layer capabilities include wavelength switching (any port to any port), sub-wavelength (typically GbE) switching (any port to any port), and Carrier Ethernet Tunnel switching (any port to any port). Again, just enough switching capability is embedded in the optical layer to eliminate all the inter-port handoffs between the service layer and the transport layer, says Gartner. In other words, CET eliminates an unnecessary handoff between the transport and service layers. Say you have a handoff between the transport layer and the service layer, but where that handoff would occur, the service layer says, "'That Ethernet is really directed downstream from where you just handed it off to me,'" explains Gartner. "If we could make that decision locally in the transport layer, we could eliminate a number of Ethernet interfaces on these boxes. We are more efficiently looking at the optical signals as they pass through the transport layer and saying, 'If it's not necessary for that signal to go up to the service layer so that it can be switched, we're not going to send it up there.'" For his part, Gartner believes the CET story will resonate with carriers because each eliminated Ethernet interface represents a cost point for the carrier. Moreover, he believes alternative architectures, including an Ethernet overlay model or IP over DWDM, struggle with scalability issues, cost issues, and especially with what he calls "organization alignment. They force the data organizations and the transport organizations to make peace with each other or give something up," he says, "and that is politically difficult to do." Phased rollout According to Gartner, Meriton's rollout of CET capabilities will occur in two phases. Phase one enables carriers to support high-density GbE networking within the metro using sub-wavelength switching (SWS) and grooming of nine GbE streams onto a 10-Gbit/sec wavelength. The capability of switching a GbE path within the optical transport layer, maintaining the path throughout the entire network, and assuring it with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) makes it ideal for wholesale interconnect services, says Meriton. Phase two will introduce support for Carrier Ethernet Tunnel switching and aggregation for local handoff. The first Ethernet tunnel technology to be supported by Meriton will be Provider Backbone Transport (PBT), which is currently undergoing ratification within the IEEE, under the proposed name of Provider Backbone Bridging -- Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE). Meriton is collaborating with Danish company TPACK to add PBT-based Carrier Ethernet Tunnel Switching to the 7200 Optical Switching Platform (OSP), Meriton's 320-Gbit/sec integrated switching and transport system. Together, the companies are developing an Intelligent Ethernet Gateway (IEG) that will be an optional component of the 7200 OSP. Gartner says he sees the initial take for the CET-enabled 7200 OSP outside of North America, particularly in Europe where BT's recent announcement in favor of PBT has turned the spotlight on the technology. However, the company will be marketing its new CET strategy worldwide. Meriton's CET functionality on the 7200 will be available in the second half of 2007. http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=123 Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Carrier Class Ethernet Transport Mick Reeve knows a thing or two about carrier Ethernet will have on today's service provider network. As a former 35-year veteran of BT, who was most recently the chief architect of BT's 21CN initiative. Reeve, who now heads up Mixtel, an independent telecommunications consulting agency, sat down with Telecommunications Magazine Editor Sean Buckley to discuss how emerging technologies such as CET (Carrier Ethernet Transport) and the emerging IEEE PBB-TE (Provider Backbone Bridging)-Tunnel Engineering standard and the complementary PBT (Provider Backbone Transport) element will make an impact on the service provider's next-gen transport network architecture. TM: As the former architect of BT's 21CN, you were at the forefront of one of the most groundbreaking network transitions in the telecom industry. What is the significance of CET in the movement to the next-generation network? Reeve: It's useful to make distinction between Ethernet as a customer service and Ethernet as transport. Both of them have been growing gangbusters. As broadband has taken off so rapidly via ADSL, ADSL2+, VDSL and even FTTH, backhaul speeds have gone up enough, and the efficiency of carrying those backhaul speeds back from DSLAMs to the core of the network over SONET/SDH has been in question. When you reach Gigabit Ethernet speeds, it becomes costly to do that with SDH, so people start to look at Ethernet as a lower cost transport technology for broadband and business services. The other [trend] is the growth of Ethernet services. As DSL has taken off you get customers replacing E1/T1 links with DSL and what would you carry over DSL would carry over that DSL but Ethernet. Maybe you would not get quite the timing and bandwidth assurance you get out of T1, but it would be a hell of a lot cheaper. That's been one of the drivers for move over from low-speed TDM circuits to carrier Ethernet. As you increase the amounts of those speeds that drives faster backhaul speeds. The true Ethernet requirements came from small enterprises up through corporate that want 10-100 Mbps connections to their enterprise, and the lowest cost way of doing that was with Ethernet. Tier one [carriers] saw competitive operators offering those services below the cost of their SDH/SONET-based services. Each of those [trends] tend to be slightly separate, but they all conspire together to move you towards an Ethernet-based network. The expectation is that carriers would be able to ride on the installed-based of enterprise switching to produce a lower-cost alternative than SONET, ATM, Frame, or even MPLS. Some of that logic may be dubious. Nevertheless, if you look at the cost of an Ethernet switch versus the cost of a router, Ethernet switches are considerably cheaper. When you are looking at transport versus services, there's a push towards Ethernet, which initially had a number of deficiencies to act as a carrier-class transport [mechanism] or service. PBT came in as part of the story to fix those deficiencies. TM: One of the emerging nuances driving CET is PBT (Packet Backbone Transport) and PBB-TE, an emerging IEEE standard. From where you sit, what's driving the need for PBB-TE/PBT? Reeve: If you look at what tends to happen with Ethernet as a service and transport, carriers were looking for ways to separate one customer from another and route by customer and service. Typically the way that would happen is they would use VLAN tags, and if the VLAN tags embedded in the MAC header the customer gave over then there was a lack of transparency because the customer might want to use those. As a result, other VLAN tags were added or they would add MPLS headers and carry over MPLS. In both of those cases, BT saw a difficulty in the sense that both of those headers are quite short, and that means you don't have the ability to have true source/destinations in those headers. You would then end up swapping every link. That's how MPLS and VLAN headers work today. An Ethernet packet comes in from a customer and then a carrier adds a VLAN tag or a MPLS tag. In the case of the MPLS tag, they were short and were swapped every link, so the ability to trace the route through the network when you're trying to assure an SLA was dependent on those VLAN or MPLS swapping tables not being corrupted. If they were corrupted, you would certainly trace the wrong route. BT saw that problem could be fixed by having a somewhat larger header. PBT chooses a MAC header to do that so you would not need to change because like an IP header it would stay the same for the duration of the route. PBT turns off all the MAC learning and broadcast that builds the routing table and populates the routing tables from a management system. The MAC learning and broadcast was one of the scalability issues of Ethernet. As the scale of the network gets bigger it becomes a limit that leads to huge amounts of signaling, broadcast storms, and maybe delays as networks change. Simply turning that off and configuring the routing table for the management system, which is what PBT does, means you set the routes up through the network very much as you would do for an SDH or ATM route. It gives the operator an Ethernet-based transport with many of the same sorts of characteristics of SONET/SDH. You can set up resilient routes and develop fixed routes where you have planned maintenance to do. It's a very comfortable thing for an operator and it does not have the scalability limits Ethernet had in its original format. At some point in the future, you may go back to a control plane to set up those tables more automatically in the same people are doing for optical routes. As a first step, [BT] wanted to get them under a management system control and therefore to avoid the scalability issues of Ethernet. Because you were turning stuff off, the expectation it would and not lead to higher prices for the hardware. You have to add that management system, and the expectation at BT was that we could repurpose the SDH management system we had already. TM: What's your sense of the various vendor approaches to CET and PBB-TE? Reeve: To answer that question, we need to understand the synergies between Ethernet and optical. There was work at BT that said you would always need three modes: the bottom was a circuit-switched optical domain, the middle was a connection packet, and the top was a connectionless packet. We had been debating the connection-oriented packet, which was a mess because we had ATM, FR, MPLS and PBT. We were pushing for PBT. In the circuit domain you had SONET/SDH, and the question was what would the future be? I was looking at G.709, which used to be called digital wrapping, which was a way to add SDH-like framing to anything. If you think about taking PBT and granularity in the Gigabit layer or above, then carrying those channels over G.709 rather than having a SONET/SDH layer, it becomes a relatively simple higher bandwidth future. There was a synergy emerging on the way you switch at the optical layer and at Layer-2 packet layer. If you begin to layer those in a correct way then you potentially end up with a simple network structure that can scale very high and forms a lower cost structure than say an SDH-based structure. When you look at what Meriton is doing, they are aiming in that direction from a ROADM structure switching from a G.709 future and TDM in the middle to a PBT-like switching structure at Layer 2. That forms a very synergistic transport approach that I quite like and we'll probably see others doing as well. What we would of said in BT is that the service layer is really IP. At the IP layer, you're seeing the real end-user services such as VoIP, and the connection-oriented packets and the circuit switch are basic transport services and things that carry users. There's quite a lot of synergy between how you arrange the connection-oriented packet and the circuit switch, which is something that Meriton is pioneering. TM: Certainly, no standards effort is easy. How is the PBB-TE standard effort progressing within the IEEE? Reeve: I had a long call recently with the chair of the PBB-TE group, and what we're seeing is that the battle lines being drawn. Some vendors are supporting and some vendors are against it. In practice there's quite a bit of work to do and transport MPLS is ahead, but, and it's quite a big but, when you look what to do in both in PBT there's some very minor tweaks to how the packets are routed. The IEEE guys don't expect that to be a big piece of work. What is a big piece of work is working out operations and maintenance issues. The interesting thing is that the transport MPLS standard has exactly the same stuff to do. Still, the standards bodies are telling me that they think in order to get to stable silicon, PBT could be finishing up by the end of this year. The other area where T-MPLS is slightly ahead is the way that different sorts of services are mapped into MPLS such as ATM, FR and Ethernet. I think PBT can reuse that stuff. In many ways the way we are seeing PBT being proposed to be used in pure Ethernet networks, you don't need those mappings anyway. I think the answer is we could see PBT be standardized for silicon guys to be comfortable. I think the message is there's work to do in the standards. http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=121 Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500 Meriton Networks: Blazing The Carrier Ethernet Transport Trail Ethernet shares a long-established legacy in both the enterprise and service provider network. In the enterprise, Ethernet is the networking protocol of choice to carry data and voice, and it continues to prove itself as a sound carrier class service At the same time, a parallel trend is taking place to utilize Ethernet in the transport domain. Certainly, there's no shortage of approaches for Ethernet transport as IP over WDM (Intelligent Packet over Optical Transport) and Carrier Ethernet Overlay (intelligent Ethernet over optical transport) have made progress in the market. Meriton Networks, however, argues the better approach is CET (Carrier Ethernet Transport). As an architectural approach to build an Ethernet-Optical transport infrastructure, Meriton's CET vision integrates Ethernet Gateway/Tunnels e.g. PBT (provider backbone transport) and PBB-TE (provider backbone bridging-traffic engineering) with intelligent WDM (wavelength and sub-wavelength switching). PBB-TE, an emerging IEEE standard that incorporates PBT, can bring control to data paths within a large carrier network, enabling QoS and the ability to set aside specific paths for specific traffic types. PBT offers a set of enhancements that bring the connection-oriented characteristics and deterministic behavior that carriers have grown accustomed to in legacy technologies such as SONET/SDH to Ethernet. PBT achieves this by disabling the concept of flooding/broadcasting and spanning tree protocol, which enables it to act like a traditional carrier transport technology. What should make service providers smile about Meriton Networks' CET strategy is that it does not require a forklift upgrade. Through the addition of enhancements to its existing flagship 7200 OSP platforms, service providers can take advantage of the benefits of CET in an evolutionary path. Meriton will offer its CET capabilities via a two-pronged product evolution. First, Meriton will add Ethernet wavelength and Sub-Wavelength switching to its existing 7200 OSP platform-all of which can be done on an any port to any port basis. By doing so, carriers can support high-density GigE networking within the metro via sub-wavelength switching and grooming of nine GigE streams onto a 10 Gbps wavelength. Staying true to an evolutionary path, the OSP incorporates GFP (Generic Framing Protocol) to carry Ethernet over SONET and the ability to integrate into existing OSS/OAM systems. What's more, by switching a GigE path within the optical transport layer and maintaining the path throughout the network with an SLA makes it a sound wholesale interconnect service play. Secondly, through a joint collaboration with TPACK, a provider of carrier Ethernet technologies will build an optional IEG (Intelligent Ethernet Gateway) element for the 7200 OSP. Initially supporting the IEEE's PBB-TE standard via an optional component for Carrier Ethernet Tunnel Switching and aggregation for local traffic handoff, the new IEG will also offer a T-MPLS variant. Even though the standards around PBB-TE and PBT are still evolving, BT (21CN) has been a major advocate of the technology and Bell Canada and Verizon are eyeing it closely. "What we're seeing with CET is that as carriers build out their incumbent territory transport architecture, they can take that Ethernet tunneling technology and embed it into the optical domain. This clearly articulates how an incumbent service provider can now offer a truly scalable transport architecture with clear lines of delineation between service and transport," said Ken Davison, VP of marketing and business development for Meriton Networks. "We have gone from the hype of building an NGN to the reality of deployment, and now we're starting to see from the vendor community and standards bodies the ability to build an NGN transport architecture that can support these services as opposed to laying the services on an assumed transport architecture." Overall, the claim Meriton is making with this product evolution is in a word: simplicity. Through CET, Meriton claims carriers can reduce GigE port consumption and reduce the need for a separate Layer 2 aggregation platform between the optical and packet layers. The promise is that by keeping the switching in the optical domain, carriers can achieve deterministic QoS, low-latency jitter approach for switching carrier Ethernet traffic. Michael Howard, Principal Analyst for Infonetics Research believes that over time, service providers make their respective next-generation migration, they will want a transport layer is Ethernet fused with WDM. "Meriton is at the center of the Carrier Ethernet Transport concept, and are headed in the right direction," said Howard "They are one of the first optical vendors to talk about PBT in an optical platform." http://www.meriton.com/news/media-details.php?mid=120 Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0500