The show floor at this year's SuperComm, held in an unusually sunny Chicago in mid-June, bustled with talk of multiservice technologies aimed at carriers looking for ways to profitably combine voice, data, and video services onto a common IP/MPLS backbone. Advances in multiservice aggregation, reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing (ROADM), Ethernet over SONET, and Layer 2 Ethernet switching generated much of the overall buzz. No major surprises, but progress is well underway. Ratification of key standards, such as IEEE 802.17 Resilient Packet Ring, IEEE 802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile, and ITU-T G.7041/Y.1303 Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), legitimized some technology platforms and implied a harder sell for others. Carriers and vendors joined forces for the first time in several interoperability demonstrations. The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) demonstrated end-to-end connection management between network equipment using intelligent control-plane technologies (user-to-network interface and network-to- network interface) as well as standards-based Ethernet over SONET/SDH transport. The network equipment supplied by 15 vendors linked seven carriers' labs around the world. Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, China Telecom, KDDI, NTT, AT&T, and Verizon participated.
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