The Big Picture

In a survey conducted by Infonetics Research, the results of which were released in December, 32% of service providers said they either would not consider using PBB-TE or already have considered and rejected it. That compares with just 5% of respondents who said the same about transport MPLS (MPLS-TP).

“A year ago, there was incredible interest in [PBB-TE],” said Steve Christo, marketing director for carrier Ethernet chip vendor Lightstorm, shortly before Infonetics released its survey. “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.”

At the same time, Nortel's gear also focuses on provider backbone bridging, a more widely used Ethernet transport technology that has been tested by Verizon and adopted by Alcatel-Lucent. And Nortel's metro Ethernet unit also includes its successful long-haul optical gear, whose fortunes also are tied to macroeconomic trends. Nortel has been selling 40 Gb/s optical gear this year based in part on the promise that customers will be able to easily upgrade that gear to 100 Gb/s once standards and products are available. To bolster that message, Nortel in December demonstrated 100 Gb/s Ethernet over a single wavelength and over 800 kilometers (even posting a video of the demo on YouTube), in which it used souped-up versions of its current optical and carrier Ethernet products.

A month earlier, Nortel's rival in the optical space, Infinera — which lately has expressed an interest in entering the metro equipment market — announced it was collaborating with Level 3 Communications, as well as Juniper Networks and the Internet2 research network, to create a 100 Gb/s Ethernet network as a test bed for 100 GigE applications and services. Ciena also demonstrated 100 Gb/s links late last year, further confirming how well vendors know that economic pressures will make carriers exceedingly eager for 100 Gb/s networks and their economies of scale. Nortel essentially is using demand for 100 Gb/s to sell 40 Gb/s products today, but which company will own Nortel's product portfolio by the time 100 Gb/s arrives is anyone's guess.