Rad Data Communications and 23 other leading telecommunications industry vendors are participating in the largest and most diverse public Carrier Ethernet multi-vendor interoperability test ever staged.

Organized by the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC), the test is being conducted at the Carrier Ethernet World Congress 2007 being held in Geneva. The live test with more than 65 devices is geared towards network operators providing Carrier Ethernet services. It is targeted at verifying the current interoperability status of a wide range of implementations as well as provisioning and fault management solutions.

Rad Data Communications Australia managing director, Udi Furman, said the company's EtherAccess line of Ethernet access devices have played a major role in the public testing process.

Featuring 802.1ag standard Ethernet OAM (Operations, Administration and Management), Rad's EtherAccess products support the rollout of Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) and Ethernet Private Line (EPL), as well as E-Line and E-LAN services, over fiber, DSL and bonded copper circuits.

"By introducing standard Ethernet OAM in the access, Rad has brought end-to-end service control to a multi-vendor, multi-access technology environment," Furman said. Rad is demonstrating an Ethernet-over-PDH/SDH service based on GFP, VCAT and LCAS using its Egate-100 aggregator and RICi-16 customer premises equipment (CPE).

Each bonded group was mapped to a VLAN into the metro network. In addition, Rad is demonstrating MEF-9 and MEF-14 compliant Ethernet access over SHDSL (2Base2L) using eight bonded wires employing Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) bonding. The company's ETX product line of fiber Ethernet network termination units (E-NTUs) are demonstrating the use of connection fault management (CFM) on E-NTUs to determine path failure and allow the device to switch to an alternative path.

Two ETX-202 units exchanged CFM loopback messages across the primary path. When a failure occurred, the units shut down the primary path and switched traffic to the backup path. Moreover, the company demonstrated TDM and ATM service emulation over PBT and T-MPLS metro clouds and across the core.

The emulation used E1 TDM and E1 ATM traffic, as is typically seen in cellular 2G/3G base stations. Both E1 TDM and ATM services were groomed onto Rad's ACE-3200 cell site gateway, tunneled through the metro clouds and terminated on RAD's ACE-3400 RNC/BSC site gateway.

Timing synchronization was successfully maintained to prevent clocking issues in the end-to-end TDM and ATM services. Rad's ACE devices support aggregation of multiple STM-1/OC-3 links over Gigabit Ethernet using pseudowire technology lines to ensure the most economical allocation of backhauling resources and the delivery of multiple 3G services. In preparation for the event, more than 70 engineers from participating companies evaluated the interoperability of their solutions in detail in a closed-door, ten-day long intense hot-staging at EANTC's lab in Berlin, Germany.

Preparations for the test began in April 2007 and covered the latest IEEE, ITU-T and MEF specifications for Carrier Ethernet services.