Ethernet Expo Europe Award Winners Unveiled

LONDON -- The winners of Light Reading's prestigious Ethernet Expo: Europe 2009 awards were announced yesterday as a finale to the highly successful conference and exhibition at the ExCel Conference Centre in London. In the Vendor of the Year category two winners were announced: Alcatel-Lucent's Service Router Portfolio for the Best Infrastructure Product, and ANDA EtherReach for the Best Access Product. Meanwhile British Telecom's Etherflow UK scooped the Best New Service, and COLT Telecom the Best Product Portfolio in the Service Provider of the Year categories.

"The Ethernet Expo Europe Awards are given to those carriers and infrastructure vendors who demonstrate Carrier Ethernet leadership and innovation that is driving the market today," stated Joseph Braue, Group Director/Senior Vice President, Light Reading.

The awards were judged by a panel of industry experts including Joe Braue; Stan Hubbard, Senior Analyst of Heavy Reading, Light Reading's technology research arm; Ray LeMaistre, Light Reading's International News Editor; and Rajiv Datta, CTO of AboveNet.

In the Ethernet Service Provider of the Year categories the Best Product Portfolio award went to COLT, ahead of the other finalists, Exponential-e and ntl:Telewest, because of its outstanding breadth of Ethernet offerings of 2-Mbit/s to 10-Gbit/s services spanning 14 countries with fiber connectivity to over 16,000 buildings.

Meanwhile, the clear winner in the Best New Service category was BT for its innovative BT Etherflow UK service, which comprises more than 614 access core nodes delivering nationwide Ethernet business coverage for managed EPL and EVPL circuits.

The Carrier Ethernet Vendor of the Year Best Infrastructure Product, awarded to the network equipment supplier shipping the best new Carrier Ethernet infrastructure platform in Europe since last year's European Ethernet Expo, went to Alcatel-Lucent ahead of the other finalists, Cisco's ASR 9000 Series Routers and Juniper's MX960 Ethernet Services Router. The award was given on the strength of Alcatel-Lucent's Service Router Portfolio (7750 SR, 7450 ESS, 7210 SAS, 7705 SAR). The judges especially commended the new FP2 chip set, allowing network processing and traffic management of speeds up to 100G, plus application assurance giving visibility for performance of business apps across virtual private networks. Also of note was Alcatel-Lucent's integrated PBB and VPLS solutions.

The Carrier Ethernet Vendor of the Year Best Access Product, awarded to the network equipment supplier shipping the best new Carrier Ethernet access platform (CEAP) in Europe since last year's European Ethernet Expo, went to ANDA EtherReach with EtherProbe, on the strength of its being the first Ethernet performance and SLA verification tool that can collect and report QOS metrics with live customer traffic. Other finalists were ADVA with its FSP 150 CC825 Carrier Ethernet Access Platform and Cisco's ME 3400E Ethernet Access Switch Series.

To view more information on the award winners and to view the video report click here: www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=176746.