Chip vendor: PBB-TE interest down greatly

Lightstorm Networks introduced a new carrier Ethernet chip set today focusing on access networks, with support for a variety of transport alternatives including Provider Backbone Bridging, pseudowires and Provider Backbone Bridging - Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE, also called PBT). But two years after PBB-TE’s debut, Lightstorm said, PBB-TE is being eclipsed in the market by PBB.

"A year ago, there was incredible interest in [PBB-TE]," said Steve Christo, Lightstorm’s marketing director. “Now there’s still interest, but it’s dropped off significantly. Definitely there are some CLECs and smaller service providers looking to use the technology. It’s just not going to be nearly as widespread as might have been discussed a year ago.”

Part of the reason for the change, Christo said, was the decision by new corporate managers at BT – a shepherd of PBB-TE technology and its biggest carrier proponent so far – to shift more toward MPLS gear, a victory for Alcatel-Lucent and a blow to Nortel Networks, which had worked with BT to develop the technology.

Last year Lightstorm joined Nortel Networks’ PBB-TE ecosystem of companies as interest in the technology ascended. But this year, Christo said, he has instead seen an “explosion” in PBB, a connectionless predecessor to PBB-TE that includes standard Ethernet protection mechanisms such as Spanning Tree.

PBB’s rise is also good for Nortel, whose PBB-TE gear also supports PBB and is being tested by Verizon, which has expressed interest in PBB’s scaling abilities. And while Alcatel-Lucent benefitted from BT’s shift to MPLS, Alcatel-Lucent introduced its own PBB capabilities this summer in recognition of market demand.

Lightstorm is focusing on the scalability of its new Brooklyn-XLA family of carrier Ethernet chips for access networks, touting the fact that they support both Q-in-Q addressing as well as MAC-in-MAC. The XLA can support 128,000 MAC addresses and 16,000 virtual local area networks (VLANs).

It also supports the industry’s three most prominent OA&M standards, 802.3ah, 802.1ag and Y1731, allowing carriers to more deeply integrate that functionality into their access devices.