Feb 7, 2007 4:11 PM,

The PBT Race

By Ed Gubbins

Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) has come a long way since last summer, when Nortel Networks announced its embrace of the point-to-point technology as a simpler, cheaper alternative to MPLS in metro networks. Back then, some analysts just didn’t get it. In at least one analyst’s eyes, the move was sour grapes--a way for Nortel to make it seem like its absence from the market for multiprotocol label-switching (MPLS) was a positive rather than a negative.

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Just eight months later, analysts are talking more about equipment vendors being forced to try to catch up to Nortel on PBT. “Nortel got religious,” Infonetics Research Principal Analyst Michael Howard told me recently. “They didn’t invest in MPLS and stuck with Ethernet.” That bet is paying off well today.

A big part of PBT’s popularity boost came from British Telecom’s selection of PBT for its next-generation network plans. Though Nortel and Siemens both won BT PBT contracts, Nortel had been working with BT for some time to explore the technology’s potential.

In boasting of the BT win last month, Nortel executives said PBT in the metro was a good complement to MPLS in the core. But they also acknowledged that PBT might play a role in the core as well. This week Meriton Networks picked up where that conversation left off, announcing a combination of PBT and optical transport that amounts to a direct rebuttal of the IP-over-dense wavelength-division multiplexing architecture Cisco Systems added to its CRS-1 core routers more than a year ago. Analysts say several vendors, Nortel included, are likely to follow Meriton’s lead.

Technology debates rarely turn so abruptly. What will we be saying about PBT this time next year?

E-mail me at egubbins@prismb2b.com

P.S. I know Alcatel-Lucent has been talking to customers around the globe about where its product portfolio is headed as it looks for merger synergies. If you’ve been a party to these discussions and have gossip to share, I’m all ears, and I protect the anonymity of my sources, so send me an e-mail today. Thanks!