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.