PBB-TE: What Now?

Meanwhile, with Nortel's ultimate fate now tied up in bankruptcy court, its metro Ethernet unit having been put on — and then off — the chopping block in recent months (and now investment in its switch/routers diverted elsewhere), PBB-TE may suffer until the future of its chief torchbearer is more certain. “[Nortel's financial problems] have provided a lot of [fear, uncertainty and doubt] for the MPLS camp [to spread],” Soapstone's Swartz said.

For now, Soapstone has focused more on PBB, a superset of PBB-TE not connection-oriented in nature that Nortel proposed as an E-LAN complement to PBB-TE. Verizon has lab-tested Nortel's PBB gear, and Alcatel-Lucent has adopted PBB in its own gear without ever favoring PBB-TE. In the second quarter, Soapstone plans to begin selling new versions of its product based on PBB and Q-in-Q technology (a similar Layer 2 scaling method also called PB or stacked VLANs), targeting Europe and Japan as its best hopes for near-term traction. The company also plans to add VPLS interworking this year.

Unlike PBB-TE, PBB was designed for E-LAN environs to begin with, so where PBB-TE lacked a control plane for E-LAN networking, PBB equipment already on the market includes on-board control planes. So why is Soapstone's product needed there? “Multivendor networks need consistency end to end, and that needs to be provided by an external management solution that has that complete view of all the technology domains, whether they're Q-in-Q, PBB or [PBB-TE],” Swartz said. “The role we're playing is managing the service, doing real-time monitoring of both the physical and logical network and providing that real visibility into what the network's doing against the [service level agreement].”

Of course, as Soapstone is currently reviewing strategic alternatives (and as its co-founder and chief technology officer departed shortly after its first product was launched), its future, like Nortel's, is cloudy, which may well weigh on customers' minds and further obscure the merits of the technology itself. It's a familiar theme in the PBB-TE story. As Ray Mota, analyst with Synergy Research, told the San Jose Mercury News in reference to Hammerhead's demise, “The timing was just brutal. … Sometimes the best technology does not win.”

“[PBB-TE] got lost for reasons other than that there were no market needs,” Larry Dennison, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Soapstone, told Telephony this April. “You really see the need for it to be bound tightly to an [operations support system]-type environment. But from an ecosystem standpoint, it was still being driven from a network equipment standpoint.”

As Nortel did in 2006, Dennison still sees market opportunity for PBB-TE. For example, eyeing emerging trends in the data center space, including the need for well-engineered virtual private networks to support cloud computing and data center virtualization, he said, “It's crying out for a [PBB-TE]-like technique.”