Verizon Telecom has selected Nortel to provide it with a PBB-based metro Ethernet backbone solution based on the vendor’s Metro Ethernet Routing Switch (MERS 8600). Philippe Morin, president of metro Ethernet networks at Nortel, told xchange today that Verizon chose the MERS 8600 to help scale its Ethernet VPN services.
PBB, or Provider Backbone Bridge, technology addresses carrier scaling requirements. By contrast, PBB-TE (and the Nortel proprietary version of it know as PBT) is a PBB-based solution optimized for point-to-point connections and brings with it 50msec resiliency and traffic engineering, explained Mike Loomis, director of Carrier Ethernet technical sales at Nortel, who noted that the vendor supports both protocols on its MERS 8600.
Nick Del Regno, principle member of technical staff at Verizon Business recently told xchange that Verizon was not interested in PBT/PBB-TE, but might be interested in PBB, though only for very limited applications.
“We see benefits, we see merit in PBB, both within our traditional native Ethernet networks that are LATA-bound, so they’re fairly geographically constrained, as well PBB may be a good tool to scale national and global VPLS networks,” Verizon’s Del Regno said.
Verizon will be testing all the MERS technologies in its laboratories for use with its Ethernet-based networks, including the Switched Ethernet Services (SES) network.
While Nortel has won the business of Verizon on the PBB front, it recently took a hit when BT — which with Nortel was the biggest booster of PBT — indicated it had cooled on PBT and would not be using the technology in the immediate future.
