* Vendors come out for Carrier Ethernet World Congress
The Carrier Ethernet World Congress going on now in Geneva is a place where network vendors want to be, because Ethernet is sweeping across carrier network architecture.
Some familiar names from the enterprise network market are making sure their voices are heard at the conference. Ethernet has reached critical mass in service provider networks, and the conference is a reflection of that. According to its Web site, the Carrier Ethernet World Congress, the official world congress of the Metro Ethernet Forum, is only in its third year, and yet the buzz is already at a very high level.
The site also points to Infonetics Research figures that predict $64 billion will be spent on metro Ethernet equipment worldwide between 2006 and 2010.
Cisco, for instance, introduced the ME 3400-24FS, which is designed to connect fiber-optic lines to apartment buildings and other multi-tenant units. As my colleague Jim Duffy wrote this week, Cisco enhanced its Carrier Ethernet products to extend 50-millisecond resiliency from the core to the customer premises.
Jim also writes that Juniper Networks is introducing two Ethernet Services Routers, the MX240 and MX480, along with new modules and software. Jim reports that these boxes are intended for small points of presence as service providers push Carrier Ethernet to more markets.
Extreme Networks says it will be using the conference to present the results of the first Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) interoperability test. PBT is an enhancement to Ethernet championed by Nortel to give Ethernet more carrier-class qualities.
In the test, PBT connections were established and data was forwarded between switches from different vendors. There was also a control-plane test where services were dynamically configured across a multi-node PBT network. Extreme says 24 vendors provided 65 devices for the tests.
Meanwhile, Foundry Networks announced it is appearing at the show, and that it will lead a presentation called “Achieving Cost-Effective Scalability of Carrier Ethernet Networks.” It is scheduled for Sept. 26, at 11:55 a.m. CEST, which I can only assume stands for “Carrier Ethernet Standard Time.”
