PBT setback follows Verizon and BT announcements

Verizon and BT have both announced their commitment to use MPLS as the service architecture for enterprise services and converged services, abandoning their consideration of PBT for the role. We had reported earlier that BT was being lobbied heavily by Cisco and Juniper to make this move, so the decision there is not a surprise. Further, Verizon had never seriously considered PBT for a region-wide deployment according to our sources; however PBT is still being explored in the metro area. There has been no loss of momentum for PBT trials according to what we are hearing, but there is no question that these two announcements will make things harder for PBT vendors, erasing the groundswell of momentum they had previously enjoyed.