Leave It to the Independent rural carriers once again to blaze the trail of a new technology.

Starting last year, Nortel Networks has led a handful of vendors in pioneering a new Ethernet-based transport technology, provider backbone transport (PBT), using a commitment from BT as a flagship. But the first to deploy the technology in the U.S. were two rural telcos: Dakota Carrier Network and Frontier, which is owned by Citizens Communications. It's unknown so far which will claim the honor of being first; both want to turn up gear in the field this month.

A point-to-point tunneling technology, PBT is being sold as an alternative to MPLS in metro networks. That simplicity is especially appealing to carriers with small engineering staffs.

“We like the ease of provisioning, monitoring and troubleshooting,” said Evan Haas, general manager of Dakota Carrier Network, a regional carrier created a decade ago by 15 rural telcos. DCN is putting PBT-based Nortel 8600s in each corner of North Dakota. And with a total of seven technicians and thousands of circuits, simplicity was important to the company. It also helped that the gear worked with the same operating system DCN was already using for other Nortel gear.

Frontier needed to increase the capacity on the Sonet links that were feeding its national backbone. That included deployment to several remote terminals, and the cost of putting routers in all those remote terminals was quite a bit more than a PBT deployment, which is based on Layer 2 technology. Nortel offered Frontier a smaller, hardened version of its gear for outside plant deployment — the 1880, which the vendor hasn't yet released.

Frontier's deployment illustrates a commonly presented model of PBT use: MPLS on the interstate and PBT on the on-ramps. The telco has an MPLS backbone based on Juniper Networks gear and will use PBT for aggregation.

Michael Golob, vice president of technical operations and support for Frontier, admits the immaturity of the technology was a concern, but added that the company tried to put some protection in its contract.

“It's that fine line between being on the bleeding edge and being a little bit behind the bleeding edge, where we wanted to be,” Golob said.

In October, Frontier was still lab-testing the gear, with plans to commence a field trial in November, tying together three counties in Mohave County, Ariz. — a strip in the northwest corner of the state that includes Lake Havasu. If it works there, the network has 15 or 20 other locations like Mohave County that could get the same treatment.

“We're looking for a long-term commitment out of this,” Golob said. “We didn't look at this as a one-time application.”

Both carriers concede the possibility that Nortel's desire for customer-wins to showcase PBT may have helped keep the price down. And both carriers realize that the deal is mutually beneficial in more ways than one.

Though Nortel has been training engineers at both telcos in how to use PBT, Golob said, “They're learning a lot from us as we deploy this, too.”