ATLANTA, June 11 -- Lucent Technologies and Foundry Networks are joining forces to accelerate the development of Optical Ethernet Metropolitan Area Networks for service providers by combining Lucent Technologies Metropolis portfolio of next-generation metro products and Foundry's end-to-end IP switching and routing products.
    The companies will cooperate on interoperability testing, co-marketing and co-selling initiatives and will coordinate trials with carriers and service providers. The alliance is designed to create a flexible architecture featuring Gigabit Ethernet, SONET, DWDM and IP to create metro networks that are faster, have greater capacity and enable service providers to create and provision new, flexible, value-added IP services.