ITU, IETF cooperate on T-MPLS standard

Maybe traditional telecom types and Internet types are starting to settle their differences. That is one observation to draw from an unlikely and possibly unprecedented cooperation between the International Telecommunations Union and the Internet Engineering Task Force. The two groups are working together on a new standard for transport-multiprotocol label switching (T-MPLS), a technology that recently has been gaining favoring over provider backbone transport (PBT, but also call provider backbone bridging-traffic engineering, or PBB-TE, if you want your acronyms good and long).

The groups had both been work on T-MPLS project, and were concerned about possible interoperability challenges. Such challenges might have helped PBB-TE recover from recent setbacks in which the technology was pushed aside in favor of others. The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers has been working on a PBB-TE standard, but it may not be ready until next year.

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