OIF to Conduct Ten-Week Worldwide Interoperability Demo

AT&T, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, NTT Laboratories, Telecom Italia and Verizon will host the Optical Internetworking Forum's (OIF's) second Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration. The carrier hosts will provide test facilities, engineering staff and real-world network connectivity continuously from mid-April through mid-June. A public demonstration of the testing will take place at SUPERCOMM 2005, June 7-9, in Chicago.


This year's OIF Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration will highlight solutions for support of Ethernet services over multi-domain SONET/SDH transport networks by employing OIF Implementation Agreements (IAs) in a multi-carrier, multi-vendor environment.


The OIF Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration 2004 addressed signaling of SONET/SDH connections from network edge-to-network edge. The 2005 event will go farther by demonstrating complete client-to-client Ethernet-over-SONET/SDH signaling. This enables Ethernet clients to signal for dynamic connections, which the SONET/SDH network provides, without requiring the client to be aware of the underlying server layer network.


Furthermore, the global interoperability event will include testing of data plane interoperability of Next Generation transport network functions such as GFP/VCAT/LCAS. This will demonstrate to the industry that this suite of ITU-T standards will support multiple vendor network environments. http://www.oiforum.com