New Applications Debut at Ethernet Congress

BERLIN, Sept. 23 -- Twelve vendors demonstrated Ethernet access applications at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress, held this month in Berlin.

Participants were RAD Data Communications, Actelis, Agilent Technologies, Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Ixia, Riverstone Networks, Shenick, Siemens, Spirent Communications, Stratex Networks and T-Pack.

The companies demonstrated interoperability and scalability of carrier Ethernet implementations, including point-to-point and multipoint business applications, plus residential triple-play applications, including voice over IP and video broadcasting traffic supplied by CPE (customer premise equipment) devices and emulators.

RAD used time division multiplexing (TDM) emulation over Ethernet to demonstrate that "an Ethernet backbone can provide transport to legacy TDM services with voice quality as high as we have come to expect from TDM systems," said Yacov Cazes, director of product management at RAD Data Communications.

"As Ethernet services grow in sophistication to include different applications and hard SLA requirements, the greater will be the need for an intelligent access device to provide end-to-end service control," said Cazes.

Six different RAD products were used in the interoperability demonstration: the ETX-102 and ETX-202 Ethernet network termination units (E-NTUs), the Egate-100 Ethernet-over-STM-1/OC-3 gateway, the Gmux-2000 central office TDM-over-IP (TDMoIP) gateway, the IPmux-14 TDMoIP gateway and the RICi-8E1/8T1 intelligent converter.

The event was organized by the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC), supported by T-Systems, and sponsored by the Metro Ethernet Forum. The demonstration showcases the results of a private hot-stage event that occurred last week at EANTC realizing residential and business Ethernet services over a protected, Quality-of-Service enabled, multi-vendor Carrier Ethernet network.

A white paper describing the RAD demonstration is available at: www. rad.com/Article/0,6583,24274,00.html