Networks & Infrastructure

PBB-TE Ups Ante on Ethernet Transport

by Sean Buckley

If there’s anything to glean from the recent announcement that BT will deploy Siemens and Nortel Ethernet equipment in its 21CN network, besides being another win for Ethernet, it’s proof that carriers are seeing value in the emerging IEEE standard for Ethernet transport, PBB-TE (Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering).

PBB-TE, which provides enhancements to Ethernet known as PBT (Provider backbone transport), can bring control to data paths within a large carrier network, enabling QoS and the ability to set aside specific paths for specific traffic types.

PBT can bring the connection-oriented characteristics and deterministic behavior that carriers have grown accustomed to in legacy technologies such as SONET/SDH to Ethernet. PBT achieves this by disabling the concept of flooding/broadcasting and Spanning Tree Protocol, which enables it to act like a traditional carrier transport technology.

BT, which will utilize the Nortel and Siemens Ethernet platforms to transport its residential and business service traffic, sees that the implementation of PBT will complement its 21CN MPLS strategy.

“The basic advantage of PBT is cost,” said Michael Howard, principal analyst for Infonetics. “If you can keep all of the transport at Layer 2, you have to have Ethernet switches; you don’t have to buy routers. PBT allows you to build a total Layer 2 transport network with no routing. I think that and the operational simplicity are the benefits of PBT vs. using MPLS.”

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