23 July 2003 San Francisco, CA Lightwave -- The IEEE 802.17 Working Group has approved the latest working ballot of the Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) standard, announced the Resilient Packet Ring Alliance, an industry advocacy group promoting RPR technology and its standardization by IEEE. The IEEE 802.17 Working Group approved draft 2.3 of the RPR standard, and will now address comments made against that draft before advancing draft 2.4 for further consideration.
"The RPR Alliance is extremely pleased that the IEEE 802.17 Working Group has achieved this milestone for RPR," said John Hawkins, chair of the RPR Alliance and senior marketing manager of optical Ethernet for Nortel Networks. "As the telecom industry begins to gear up again after the market slump, carriers are increasingly looking to standardized RPR as a cost-effective solution to deliver carrier-class voice, data, and video over existing SONET/SDH rings. This step forward allows carriers to have full confidence in standardized RPR as option for delivering metro services."
"With the standard moving closer to finalization, we are seeing more and more vendors developing standard-compliant silicon, systems, and test equipment," said Martin Green, vice president of marketing for the RPR Alliance and product manager for Cisco Systems. "The pace of RPR product development will only increase as we get close to the completion of the IEEE standard and move to interoperability testing."
Draft 2.3 of the IEEE 802.17 Working Ballot was approved by the Working Group members. During the 802.17 Working Group meeting this week in San Francisco, members are working to resolve the outstanding technical comments and publish Draft 2.4. Pending acceptance of the changes to resolve the technical comments, the RPR standard will move to "sponsor ballot" for approval. Sponsor ballot requires approval of the 802.17 RPR standard by IEEE members who have been accepted into the IEEE Sponsor Ballot Pool.