Full circle: IEEE approves RPR standard

"Complementing, not competing." This, says the RPR (Resilient Packet Ring) Alliance, is the mantra of any embedded carrier looking to offer new services while augmenting its existing infrastructure. Soon carriers will be able to take advantage of adding RPR to the tool-box to deliver services in the metro network as during this year's SUPERCOMM show in June, the IEEE 802.17 working group approved the RPR standard.

Bringing any standard to fruition always takes a lot of work and compromise, but RPR Alliance Chairman John Hawkins feels that the adoption of the standard could open new doors. "During the first year or two as an organization, we had to do a lot of tutoring [about] what RPR is," said Hawkins. "Almost immediately we had to take a stance of positioning it in this 'complementing, not competing' message. At first, people were saying it would kill SONET and kill Ethernet, and it took some time to put it in its proper context to get those misconceptions out of the way. In the last year or so, we turned the corner from having to convince people it wouldn't be killing other technologies, but complementing both the installed base and extending the value of Ethernet beyond its LAN characteristics."

But the standard will not just stop here. Hawkins pointed out that the 802.17 working group has proposed an 802.17b standard to address enhanced bridging, or the ability to bridge between rings and maintain the spatial reuse characteristics of the RPR ring when a carrier is hopping between rings.

At SUPERCOMM RPR was a hot topic. A good number of vendors, including Alcatel, C-Cor, Corrigent Systems, Nortel Networks and Zhone, to name a few, showcased their respective RPR wares during the show.

Corrigent, for one, demonstrated RPR protection switching over a 10-Gbps ring on its CM-100 Packet ADM (add/drop multiplexer) as part of the Metro Ethernet Forum's multi-vendor interoperability showcase. The vendor also debuted a new feature on its CM-100 packet ADM to directly interwork with an MPLS backbone.

Other players such as C-Cor have been beefing up their product lines with RPR. C-Cor recently purchased Lantern Communications, and Zhone Technologies is integrating RPR functionality into its flagship MALC packet loop carrier product line. The vendor offers a Gigabit uplink card to support multiple redundant line-rate GigE traffic on an existing MALC platform.

Infonetics Research has uncovered demand for RPR from the carrier community. In a recent study, the firm found that 63 percent of the major carriers in both Europe and North America that were interviewed would be offering Ethernet services over RPR in the next year.

On the carrier front, RPR, while still in the formative stage, has been making waves in a pre-standard mode, especially in the cable MSO market where those operators are using the technology to integrate their business and residential traffic over a common infrastructure. Cox Business Services, for one, just squared a deal to provide managed Ethernet service to Care New England Health System. The new service, which will enable the company to converge both voice and data over a common infrastructure, is based on Nortel Networks' Optical Metro 3500 with RPR capabilities.

On the IXC side, AT & T has probably been the most public about its RPR plans. The IXC previously debuted its RPR-based Ultravailable Managed OptEring Service in a controlled rollout in New York City. This service allows customers a secure pipe to transport data, packet video and voice over ring topologies, which enables a multi-site business in a metro area to interconnect its respective sites as a private or virtual LAN network.

Alternatively, MCI, while seeing the merits of RPR, is not completely sold yet. "We have looked at RPR, and, yes, it has some good attributes, but we have some concerns how it would scale to a network to our size," said Jack Wimmer, MCI's vice president of network architecture and advanced technology. "If we think about our network and build Layer 2 connectivity out to the customer, we have some other approaches in mind that don't require RPR."

COPYRIGHT 2004 Horizon House Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group