Nortel defends PBT

I read with great interest Jim Duffy's recent story "Is MPLS alternative DOA?"

I appreciate his disclaimer upfront that he was at an MPLS show and that some competitors went to great lengths to keep the focus on MPLS at the expense of [Provider Backbone Transport].

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that Nortel would disagree with the theoretical contention that PBT is DOA. We also do not consider ourselves a lone wolf. Other firms in addition to Nortel and Hatteras Networks, including Siemens, Extreme Networks, TPack, Meriton Networks, Anda Networks and Soapstone Networks, have all expressed plans to support PBT.

As well, when PBT was officially approved as an IEEE project at that body's meeting in March (giving it the name PBB-TE [Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering], and the number IEEE 802.1Qay), the vote to do so was unanimous. So, while our representative at the FutureNet panel may have been the lone PBT advocate on this panel, Nortel does not stand alone in the industry by any means.

With PBT, we do have a simpler solution that also provides operational advantages, and that will translate to cost savings for providers as they migrate to Ethernet. As you pointed out in your story, PBT metros and MPLS/VPLS [Virtual Private LAN Service] cores can in fact coexist, which is exactly how Nortel views the situation as well.

Pat Cooper

Technology Media Relations

Nortel Networks

Toronto

Goes Gibbs one better on e-mail

In his recent newsletter "Bulk e-mail, the Web, marketing and law", Mark Gibbs wrote, "I have a suggestion: We need a simple set of laws to regulate the e-mail marketing industry."

The problem with this is the same problem we have with every effort like it. You can't legislate an answer to an engineering problem.

The real answer is the same one that has been danced around for a decade or more: SMTP needs to be replaced by some standard that has built in accountability on the part of sender and receiver.

One that will not allow anonymous senders to directly deliver mail to receiving systems.

One that requires all end users to relay through their ISP using their account name and password from IP addresses known to be part of that ISP's range of IP addresses.

One that forbids an end user from specifying a return address that does not match the user ID and password used to submit the e-mail to the ISP.