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Nortel Pipes Carrier Ethernet For Convergence |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Tuesday, 21 November 2006 |
Nortel has officially launched a carrier grade Ethernet network
it demonstrated to Australian customers earlier this year. A number of
Australian carriers have committed to trials this year, and will join major
global customers in testing the technology both locally and overseas.
Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) is designed as a
cost-effective transmission solution across fibre optics that brings together a
plethora of services onto a single protocol network.
"With the anticipated boom in bandwidth-hungry applications
like IPTV, wireless backhaul, xDSL backhaul, business services and interactive
multimedia, Australian carriers are looking for an efficient way of
transporting large chunks of data at competitive price points," says Ryan
Perera, director, MEN Product Management Asia, Nortel.
"A few years ago there was a real mix of protocols that
carried voice, data, video and storage traffic, but it's now all converging
onto a seamless IP-based platform," says Perera. "Carriers are therefore
looking to simplify their existing transport networks - many of which have
grown organically over the years as a haphazard mix of subsystems."
The idea is to make it easier to transport high bandwidth data over long
distances for voice, data and other multimedia solutions.
Nortel explains that while Ethernet is not generally seen as
a carrier technology, this solution could change all that.
"Ethernet is an open-standards protocol that originated at
the enterprise level," says Perera, "so it's not regarded as a carrier-grade
technology yet but is unquestionably very cost-effective and simple to use.
New Nortel technologies enablers, such as Provider Backbone
Transport (PBT) and some fibre optics smarts, let carriers make use of existing
infrastructure investments to transport Ethernet.
"We pioneered technologies like Common Photonic Layer (CPL)
that radically reduce the cost of moving large volumes of data seamlessly
across metro, regional and long haul networks, and this technology is already
being put to use in Australia," says Perera.
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