re: BT Likes Nortel's New Ethernet FlavorThere are some very smart people still in Nortel, the company saw massive downfall in last few years, not because of the product deficiencies, but some very incompetant people were able to make to upper management (total screw up). Its a case of mismanagement.
re: BT Likes Nortel's New Ethernet FlavorI think that the idea is that they use technologies such as PBT to backhaul traffic to IP routers.
I do also think that the whole PBT concept is flawed.
Let's say I am a BT competitor in the UK - I will be saying to my customer "You know that BT is selling you a servive that is built using LAN switches, is essentially proprietary and is limited in the services it offers (no multipoint, multicast, broadcast)."
This is the best news any of BTs competitors have had in years.
re: BT Likes Nortel's New Ethernet FlavorEven this gigeguy thinks PBT is for the birds:
1. VPLS is highly superior - more efficient on the wire, supports multipoint and broadcast services, faster recovery from MPLS fast reroute, traffic engineering and QoS support, etc.
2. Nortel is only supporting this because their attempt at an MPLS/VPLS edge router, Neptune, was a total bust.
3. BT thinks this will be cheaper than MPLS, well sometimes you get what you pay for. Five 9s reliability requires the same HW and SW mechanisms (redundant power supplies and crossbar switches, nonstop software features including SW upgrades, etc.) regardless of what protocols are used. PBT done as a reliably as MPLS won't cost much less.
4. As metroman notes, this is very good news for BT's competition.
re: BT Likes Nortel's New Ethernet FlavorBT is way out on a limb if they are serious about this. I dont know of any other major provider thinking like this (the US has all already gone to MPLS). And, I don't see how it provides a differentiated service from other other carriers that offer similar Ethernet connectivity. In fact, it misses the boat on L3VPNs.
Using PBT to "backhaul to a router" also seems like a poor reason to deploy PBT as that could have been done over NG SDH gear or numerous other ways (Ethernet backhaul is done today and doesn't take PBT or need that kind of scale).
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R.