The Resilient Packet Ring Alliance, an industry advocacy group promoting the standardization of resilient packet ring (RPR) technology, today announced that the IEEE 802.17 Working Group agreed on a single baseline draft for the RPR standard at its meeting last week in Orlando, FL.
To date, more than 400 people have participated in the IEEE 802.17 RPR standard development efforts. The January meeting included representatives from systems vendors, silicon suppliers, and public network providers as well as university and nonprofit organizations. The baseline document for the RPR standard resulting from this working group meeting received support from more than 75% of the participants. The working group will meet again in March to continue developing the standard.
"RPR is considered one of the leading technologies for carriers to build new and upgrade existing metro data networks," explains Robert Love, chair of the RPR Alliance and vice chair of the IEEE 802.17 Working Group. "With this consensus in the 802.17 working group, the RPR standard preserves the value proposition for carriers: their metro networks can carry more data with greater reliability and efficiency and at lower cost."
Xilinx, a supplier of complete programmable logic solutions, participated in the meeting as a new member of the RPR Alliance, expanding the membership roster to 18 leading companies.
"We have seen demand building from our customers for solutions that solve the MAN bottleneck," asserts Robert Bielby, senior director of strategic solutions marketing at Xilinx. "RPR shows great promise as a viable solution to address the demands of this market as it provides resiliency, interoperability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness that will ease carrier's transitions to next-generation data networks. Our membership will help Xilinx to readily develop and deploy solutions that will accelerate the build-out of this new market," he adds.
The RPR Alliance was founded in January 2001 to promote the adoption of an RPR standard for LANs, MANs, and WANs by educating the networking industry about the technology, the benefits of an IEEE standard, and the need for multi-vendor interoperability.
Principal members of the RPR Alliance include Alcatel, Alidian Networks, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Corrigent Systems, Dynarc, Lantern Communications, Luminous Networks, Mindspeed Technologies, Nortel Networks, Riverstone Networks, and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. Avaya Communication, Chip Engines, Huawei Tech Co., NEC Corporation, Xilinx, and ZTE Corporation are participating members in the Alliance.
For more information, visit the Alliance's Web site at www.RPRAlliance.org.