Some equipment vendors set to unveil new carrier Ethernet gear at the NXTcomm08 trade show next week are spilling the beans a week early, including Redback Networks, RAD Data Communications and Aktino.

Redback Networks, well established in the IP router market, is introducing at NXTcomm08 its first carrier Ethernet switch. The Smart Metro (or SM) 480, available in the fourth quarter, is the first in a line of Layer 2 gear from Redback that will offer fast, economical transport of carrier Ethernet services using point-to-point protocol (PPP) while retaining some of the intelligence of Redback’s IP-based routers.

Essentially it allows carriers to extend subscriber management information and capabilities further out in the network, Redback said. That reach, brought now to the metro, could, for example, give wholesale carriers a better grip on carrier Ethernet services.

“We’re keeping the awareness from an application level that is of value and the granularity to understand those services,” said Steve Murray, Redback’s vice president of product management. “We still have the same hierarchical [quality of service], the same amount of queues and the ability to schedule and support services as in the SmartEdge [products], but we’re doing it at Layer 2. So some IP awareness would need to be communicated through RADIUS [remote authentication dial-in user service] systems. I wouldn’t have [deep packet inspection] in this box. I wouldn’t be able to find [peer-to-peer] traffic and treat it. But if I had an external OSS telling me, ‘Here’s a [video on demand] session, put it in a queue,’ I could do that.”

With Fast Ethernet, 1-Gb/s and 10 Gb/s Ethernet interfaces, the SM480’s quarter-rack chassis can handle 256,000 virtual local access networks (VLANs) or users. With 8 queues per VLAN and 48,000 VLANs on a card, the system can handle 2.3 million queues per form, Redback said.

RAD Data Communications is unveiling a new product focused on mobile backhaul and business services for multitenant environments. Perhaps the key feature of the new Ipmux216 pseudowire access gateway is its ability to support multiple independent clocking mechanisms for different customers, all over Ethernet.

The one-rack-unit-tall box, available later this month, allows up to 16 different timing sources, so carriers can serve multiple customers simultaneously and independent of one another.

“We built into the ASIC the capability of adaptively recovering clocking on a per-T-1 basis rather than on a product basis,” said Eitan Schwartz, RAD’s vice president of Carrier Ethernet technologies. “Each T-1 can lock to a different timing source. So in mobile backhaul, you could have 4 T-1s locked to T-Mobile and 8 to AT&T.”

RAD expects the gear to be popular not only with mobile backhaul providers but also for cable operators serving Ethernet services over T-1s to business customers in multitenant units because it allows several customers to be served independently over the same existing infrastructure.

A new product from Aktino, available later this summer, is designed to help carriers migrate backhaul networks (wireless and wireline) from legacy TDM and ATM technology to carrier Ethernet. The 1-rack-unit-high product, which didn’t have a name as of last Friday, delivers “up to 90+ Mb/s” over 12,000 feet of copper, according to Aktino. It has a coaxial cable connection in the back and multiple Ethernet interfaces in front.

Aktino has thus far focused on bonding copper lines for carrier Ethernet delivery, using a combination of symmetrical Discrete Multitone (DMT) and Multiple-Input/Multiple-Output (MIMO) technologies. The new product represents a combination of Aktino’s existing gear. It allows carriers to switch from 45-Mb/s DS-3 traffic (which Aktino claims it can transport up to 17,000 feet) to carrier Ethernet using a simple graphical interface.