Riverstone wins deal with Telefonica de Espana

Riverstone Networks today revealed a new contract with Telefonica de Espana that involves a 12-city roll out of Riverstone’s gear. The Tier 1 provider will deploy Riverstone’s RS 38000 and RS 8600 metro routers in Spain to deliver guaranteed bandwidth, customized backup, fast recovery time and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)-based services.

Telefonica will be offering IP VPNs, virtual private lines and virtual private LAN services through the use of the Riverstone equipment. The company will also be able to prioritize traffic using the MPLS functions.

“They are putting in a new metro core and using Layer 2 MPLS,” said Steve Garrison, director of corporate marketing at Riverstone. “It’s a fully meshed network where every router has at least two connections driving it back to the core,” Garrison said.

Essentially Telefonica will be dropping in an Ethernet layer, which will be backhauled into data centers. So far Telefonica is just using Riverstone equipment for the rollout, which is ongoing. The provider is already offering commercial service in some areas where the equipment is installed.

Using Layer 2 MPLS technology as a service is a real technology and business milestone, according to Garrison.

“This is a great win for us,” Garrison said.