re: BT Issues 21CN Ethernet RFPHaving this hole in the product portfolio is painful for Scott K. He cannot deny It no matter how long he talks on conference calls.
Could Foundry, or EXTR sneak in to 21C?, well we will just wait and see. Teee Heee
re: BT Issues 21CN Ethernet RFPThe Vendor or Vendors with partners winning the ITT should surely be the one with the best SOA and capability to manage end to end Quality of Customer Experience. jaya
re: BT Issues 21CN Ethernet RFPCould Foundry, or EXTR sneak in to 21C?, well we will just wait and see. Teee Heee -----------------------------------------------
you know the answer to your question so why bother me?
First of all look at who BT really wants to do business with. They want a low-cost ethernet solution. they have been pushing the new PBT 802 standards with Nortel. They have been testing Nortel gear in their labs. They love the price of Huawei gear and Huawei is desparate for their business. hmmm...
Second, carriers want to buy products from companies that understand the carrier requirements, that have committed to carrier-class quality and understand the development, support and sales requirements. Reseller relationships will not provide that. Enterprise is a different animal.
Extreme and Foundry have made repeated attempts to sell to the Tier 1 providers with some limited success mostly in Asia. Riverstone made the biggest committment and has had some success but could not really make it stick in the end due to quality, management, financial and technical problems. The many Tier 1 labs I have been in like the price but will not even consider these products outside their internal "IT" networks.
Don't shoot the messenger. I don't agree with anything BT is doing here. They wan't ultra, ultra cheap ethernet transport and I believe that Nortel and Huawei are giving them the worst kind of vendor sweet-talk (what others call fabrications, exaggerations, prevarications, etc.)
I agree with everything you said about Nortel and PBT. I would not be surprised to see another vendor sneak in there but they will use these two to beat them up on price as much as possible.
When I said they want to do business with Huawei, I meant in the ethernet segment, not DSL. This would be the first real customer outside of Asia for Huawei for such a product.
re: BT Issues 21CN Ethernet RFPtmc1: "First of all look at who BT really wants to do business with. They want a low-cost ethernet solution. they have been pushing the new PBT 802 standards with Nortel. They have been testing Nortel gear in their labs. They love the price of Huawei gear and Huawei is desparate for their business. hmmm..."
I believe they already do business with Huawei. So Huawei have at least gotten over that hump. Nortel - they don't exactly instill confidence, and the only reason they are even mentioned is that they have Bross's ear.
I can't imagine conceiving of the 21CN network, making ethernet the cornerstone, and then coming up with an ethernet RFP about two years later. Something fishy in the state of Denmark!
And why PBT when they have a converged network model - why not build on MPLS? Why on earth would they go back to an NMS-based manually-configured VLAN-based network, even if it is somewhat GMPLS friendly.
Anyway, by the time they put a control plane to get around the manual provisioning of hundreds of what sound very much like SONET/SDH cross-connects done ethernet-style, it's not going to be an el-cheapo box. Put some QoS on the sucker, engineer some traffic engineering capabilities, stick in some fast failover methods, and you have a 21CN-worthy ethernet box. Oh yeah, and don't forget the OAM. Hmmm. Sounds like we could have one of these in time for 22CN.
Who, besides Nortel, would consider this a strategically good move?
As far as Nortel is concerned, is this Neptune rising from, er, ..., wherever Neptunes rise from, like the Sisyphian boulder, only to roll down into the ocean, ensconced in Morphean slumber. Ugh, I just mixed way too many graeco-roman mythological metaphors. I need a coffee.
There, I just asked more questions in one posting than Peter Heywood could.
Yet I think your question answer by yourself! MPLS way to costly and BT realizing now. (Others just getting ther). Must do something or look really bad with big boss in tall shinny building. With a costly control plane that doesn't even deliver determinism. Bad - someone get fired.
So... enter new ITT with only a small wrinkle. Look mother, no MPLS required! Cheap and readily implementable on cheap EThernet switch. Brilliant! Why didn't we think of such before? Aha! We did. Let's call it.... PBT!
But you guys overlooking bigger picture -- this not about BT only. Many providers looking at this real close. Only obstacle is how not to get fired by recommend non-Cisco solution!
re: BT Issues 21CN Ethernet RFPProvider Backbone Transport seems to be a good solution for Ethernet Services over a purely switched network like in an enterprise or a MAN. I think this is an optimal way of giving a QOS over a switched network. Of course for router based networks MPLS remains appropriate for QOS sensitive transport for Wide Area Ethernet Services.
re: BT Issues 21CN Ethernet RFPAnd why PBT when they have a converged network model - why not build on MPLS? Why on earth would they go back to an NMS-based manually-configured VLAN-based network, even if it is somewhat GMPLS friendly.
Because MPLS equipment is too expensive and isn't supported by any of the OSS vendors that they use. PBT is much closer to SDH in provisioing terms, and they know how to manage that.
Put some QoS on the sucker, engineer some traffic engineering capabilities, stick in some fast failover methods, and you have a 21CN-worthy ethernet box. Oh yeah, and don't forget the OAM. Hmmm. Sounds like we could have one of these in time for 22CN.
You really aren't up to date with Ethernet hardware are you? Go and look at the recent vendor press releases, and see that all of those features either already exist, or are due in the next 12 months. While you are at it, it wouldn't hurt you to go and find out how PBT really works rather than just sling wild accusations at it.
Could Foundry, or EXTR sneak in to 21C?, well we will just wait and see. Teee Heee