BOSTON -- Lantern Communications (www.lanterncom.com) is demonstrating today for the first time, its recently announced Metro Packet Switch (MPS), the industry's first true 10 Gbps Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) product at the prestigious NGN (Next Generation Networks) trade show in Boston. The MPS establishes a new benchmark for Ethernet services in metropolitan area networks (MAN). Based on work being done within the IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) Working Group, the MPS system provides a reliable packet transport solution for the delivery of scalable Ethernet services in the MAN. These Ethernet services are hardened with the throughput guarantees and sub-50 millisecond service restoration capability required of carrier-class infrastructure. The MPS is optimized for quality of service, protecting Service Level Agreements for thousands of service policies. Featuring active bandwidth management techniques including dynamic bandwidth allocation and proactive congestion avoidance, MPS rings can achieve 95% bandwidth utilization while preserving service level agreements. The MPS integrates these capabilities in a hardened platform designed to meet NEBS Level 3 specifications. The MPS system is available in two models, the fourteen-slot MPS-AX and the six-slot MPS-FX. The 80 Gbps MPS systems support burstable, QoS-assured Ethernet services (VLAN service, transparent LAN service, Ethernet Virtual Private Line) and T1, E1 and T3 circuit services on a 10 Gbps metropolitan fiber ring. An MPS packet ring can scale to over several thousand kilometers in circumference and can include over one hundred MPS nodes. The MPS' policy-controlled, multi-field packet classification features supports the creation of a wide variety of services. Network operators will deploy MPS packet rings to support an array of value-added applications - e.g., assured Internet access, SAN over IP, video distribution, video multicast and broadcast, voice over IP, Ethernet virtual private LANs, T1/E1/T3 TDM - delivered with unmatched service guarantees and cost-efficiencies.

Lantern Communications Inc.