With more than 800 delegates, the 2007 edition has confirmed MPLS World and the Carrier Ethernet Workshop asTHE major rendez-vous for the industry worldwide. The 2008 edition will welcome 1000 participants, 40 exhibitors and co-organize an interoperability platform welcoming more vendors.
Because each year the Congress brings together the most renowned engineers in the industry, their live debate with operators provides for a rich source of information to the hundreds delegates in the audience.
The 2008 agenda again privileges operator and enterprises scenarios and testimonies.
Particular attention is paid this year to Ethernet and MPLS merging process through T-MPLS, PBT and PBB. OAM and high availability issues are given a larger session. Mobile backhaul, multicast and services are also covered in detail.
The proposals have been analyzed and categorized according to their degree of pertinence by the members of the scientific committee.
Upper Side would again like to thank the members of the committee for their commitment and support.
This year, the traditional debate will address OAM, one of the main issues for both MPLS and Carrier Ethernet infrastructures. As each year, the panel will propose a fruitful confrontation between Carrier Ethernet and MPLS vendors, mediated by service providers.
The second edition of the Carrier Ethernet Worshop will discuss technological and implementation detailed issues in parallel with the traditional MPLS Tutorial addressed by the MFA. The workshop will be addressed by the MEF ambassadors for the standardization process review. Other sessions will welcome vendors for business models and solutions descriptions and carriers for deployment reports.
The Congress has always distinguished itself by the high level of technical quality of the presentations given. This has been made possible thanks to the efforts of the scientific committee and the highly competent speakers selected.
The same selection process will be applied again this year in order to exercise greater control over the technical merit of the presentations so as to obtain an irreproachable level of quality. The underlying aim is to rule out and disqualify any presentations given by vendors and operators that are too marketing oriented.
Moreover, all speakers will have to adhere to presentation guidelines (for example, avoid speaking too long on a company's activities, avoid redundant general topic introductions, and of course avoid purely vaunting products and services).
Upper Side thus intends to maintain the very high level of technical quality which its conferences have built their reputation on.
The Congress owes much of its success to the interoperability platform. The major manufacturers all participate in this platform showcasing service and product interoperability.
The European Advanced Networking Test Center in collaboration with Upperside will invite industrials to a multi-vendor MPLS & Ethernet interoperability test in
January.
The EANTC will evaluate state of the art MPLS & Ethernet architectures and applications in a detailed technical hot-staging.
The test results will be demonstrated in a public showcase during the MPLS & Ethernet World Congress 2008. Service providers will support the preparation of the test plan and participate in the hot-staging and public event.
Participation is open to all vendors of MPLS routers and switches, traffic emulators and analyzers, provisioning and fault management vendors.
During the 2008 edition, EANTC and the participating vendors will design and construct a complete mobile backhaul transport network supporting MEF and IP/MPLS Forum defined services. Participation in the transport network will demonstrate device's capabilities in constructing mobile backhaul networks and the ability to interoperate with other leading vendors in the industry.
Mobile application vendors (3GPP, 4G, WiMax) will attach their equipment to the backhaul network to demonstrate service interoperability and to enable mobile application demonstrations at the public showcases.
For the 2007 edition, three areas had been picked for the showcase: Inter-Carrier connectivity solutions, Multicast VPN services and multi-vendor service provisioning and fault management.
Detailed results of the 2007 tests are available on this link.
The exhibition space will once again ratify MPLS & Ethernet World as the only real scientific exhibition dedicated to this technology.
The exhibition will gain in scope with the addition of service providers wishing to demonstrate their services to enterprises.
MPLS and Ethernet 2008 exhibition floor is fully soldout.
