The IP/MPLS Forum announced the successful completion of the pilot phase of its "MPLS in Mobile Backhaul" Certification program, with 4 vendors completing and successfully passing the tests. Vendors who have successfully completed this initial phase of certification include:
- Alcatel-Lucent - 7750 Service Router and 7705 Service Aggregation Router
- Huawei Technologies - CX600 Series Metro Service Platform
- Juniper Networks - BX7000 Multi-Access Gateway.
In addition, Cisco has already been certified as part of the pilot phase of the certification program which was announced in February.
In this initial phase of certification, the test focused primarily on certifying standards-compliant implementations of TDM services over MPLS as used in the IP/MPLS Forum's MPLS Mobile Backhaul Initiative (MMBI) which outlines how MPLS can be used to backhaul TDM traffic for mobile operators. Iometrix conducted the testing.
"Mobile operators today must resolve the burden imposed by ever-increasing bandwidth usage by mobile users," said Bob Mandeville, CEO of Iometrix. "A critical part of the solution is how to deal with circuit-based backhaul traffic which is still used by a large portion of mobile backhaul-based equipment in the network today. Through these certification tests, we have been able to certify solutions which meet the MMBI specifications, thus giving operators, standard based easily-understood MPLS-based solutions to begin deploying immediately for mobile backhaul."
The Forum noted that additional phases of the certification program will be announced shortly, and will certify both ATM and IP solutions over MPLS, thereby ensuring a broad range of application support for operators across various Radio Access Networks (RAN) architectures including GSM, UMTS, HSPA, LTE and WiMAX.
http://www.ipmplsforum.org
