Major Players Battle over Layers: Layer-2 and Layer-3 Vendors Tussle over Metro Links

Buried amid industry hoopla about end-user gadgets and macroeconomic issues such as upcoming wireless spectrum auctions, an arcane but increasingly vexing niche of the Internet\´s architecture has become the subject of considerable debate. At stake is the "promised land" of carrier Ethernet traffic traversing the globe. In preparing for the next-generation network, however, carriers have had to combine their IP-based core resources with legacy synchronous optical network (SONET) and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) access technology in the transport layer. How the world\´s carriers will best combine and migrate those resources into a robust and warrantable packet-based network is the crux of the issue.