LAS VEGAS -- Alcatel-Lucent today unveiled a method for transporting business services through metro networks that combines the vendor’s familiar multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) with Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) -- a Layer 2 technology whose use represents a departure for the vendor.

“Alcatel-Lucent is the first major IP/MPLS equipment vendor to announce support for PBB,” said Mark Seery, vice president of switching and routing at Ovum. “This is important in the context of the current PBB/PBB-TE controversy [and] demonstrates [Alcatel-Lucent’s] pragmatism.”

Alcatel-Lucent’s aim was to increase the scalability of multipoint carrier Ethernet services delivered over MPLS networks using widely deployed virtual private LAN service (VPLS). As those services proliferate, the number of customer addresses in metro networks pile up, giving rise to concerns that their management could grow prohibitively complex for large national and international carriers.

PBB reduces the number of customer addresses by affixing a new, smaller set of addresses for use only in the metro and the core. But PBB lacks traffic engineering capabilities suitable for those networks. So Alcatel uses VPLS, integrated with PBB, to handle those functions, while PBB employs its own traffic engineering -- including Spanning Tree -- only in the customer-facing access portion of the network, where traffic flow is more predictable.

“Our solution is PBB wrapped around the edges of the metro, VPLS in the metro and the core, all over an underlying MPLS network layer,” said Lindsay Newell, Alcatel-Lucent’s vice president of marketing.

Newell brushed off comparisons of this method to Provider Backbone Bridging - Traffic Engineering, which he said was still merely a “point-to-point” technology a long ways from standardization. Meanwhile, Fujitsu Network Communications, which announced support for PBB-TE in its packet optical platform this month, called PBB-TE the “ideal” technology for metro networks.

Still, Alcatel-Lucent’s new embrace of PBB gives the vendor something new in common with PBB-TE lead proponent Nortel Networks, which offers PBB in combination with PBB-TE (in multicasting applications, for example) and last week announced lab trials at Verizon for a combination of PBB and MPLS interfaces.

Alcatel-Lucent today named KPN in the Netherlands as having deployed its PBB/VPLS combination, using the vendor’s 7450 Ethernet service switch and its 7750 service router. But although the vendor also announced Qwest Communications and Embarq as customers of its VPLS gear today, it did not announce any North American trials for integrated PBB/VPLS networks.