BT backs Ethernet for 21st Century Network

By Steve Malone

Posted on 29 Jun 2005 at 14:29

BT is to opt for Ethernet in the development of its so-called 21st Century Network. The news was given to a conference at the 'The Future of Carrier-Class Ethernet 2005,' in London by the company's CTO Matt Bross.

Once completed, BT says that the network will represent one of the world's largest Ethernet installations.

Bross told the conference, 'BT is transitioning the foundation of our entire business and we're putting Ethernet at the heart of our plans.'

He also weighed in on the debate on whether Ethernet or IP/MPLS is the future of large scale data transport and declared that BT was agnostic on the subject and said that both systems were 'essential'.

MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label switching is, as the name suggests, a way of labelling packets in an IP network to allow multiple types of traffic to coexist on the same network, ease traffic management and produce higher performance.

Bross said 'We think that there's room and an absolute need in the market for both, we're committed to both and we're not going to get distracted by it'

However, he admitted that Ethernet was not ready for truly carrier class applications just yet. He said that Ethernet needed to offer similar levels of security and resilience, fault and performance monitoring, error location and remote configuration.

Nevertheless, Bross believes Ethernet can be made sufficiently robust to underpin the BT infrastructure. 'We don't believe that Ethernet today is truly carrier class for the 21st Century,' he said. 'But we know it will be soon. We're confident and we're heavily involved in working with equipment suppliers and standards bodies to ensure it is.'

BT has also announced three new Ethernet products. BT GigeStream, is a point-to-point Ethernet private circuit service available nationally at speeds of between 250Mbit/s and 1Gbit/s. The second is BT EVLAN, a VPLS based metro any-to-any Ethernet LAN service. Both are slated to arrive next month.

The third is an updated version of BT Enterprise Ethernet, a new low bandwidth version of its MegaStream product and that will offer many of the characteristics of a traditional private circuit, but with the benefit of a low cost Ethernet interface. The Enterprise Ethernet product will be available later this summer.