The market for carrier-grade Ethernet equipment is growing as enterprises look to Ethernet services for more cost effective bandwidth and service providers look to reduce their own network infrastructure costs to increase service profitability.
Essential components for Ethernet to support these applications are: scalability, reliability, hard QoS/traffic management, service management and support for TDM services.
To date, MPLS-based solutions have been the only technology option that solved all these requirements.
Nortel's Metro Ethernet solutions change this landscape by providing new alternatives for Metro networks that are based on Ethernet forwarding, simplicity and cost curves, without any loss of functionality.