Responding to a recent report on the market prospects of an MPLS alternative for metro Ethernet, edge switch market Hammerhead Systems this week reiterated a soul-baring confession.

It is not religious.

Hammerhead took issue with Cisco’s claims at a conference last week that its implementation of Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) alongside MPLS in its edge switch is complicated. PBT is being pitched by proponents as an alternative to MPLS and Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) as a simpler, less expensive alternative for certain metro Ethernet applications.

“We think this is the opposite of complicated,” says Rob Keil, cofounder and vice president of marketing and business development at Hammerhead. “It’s very easy. What’s interesting about the approach we’ve taken is, we don’t really have a position around PBT per se. We’re agnostic, we’re not in a religious position one way or another here.”

Following a Hammerhead presentation at last week’s Future-Net conference in New York on the interworking of PBT and MPLS/VPLS in a Hammerhead switch, a Cisco engineer questioned the presenter on how the company’s implementation mitigated complexity. The Cisco engineer, Monique Morrow, offered to discuss the matter off-line with the Hammerhead presenter but such a discussion never took place, according to Hammerhead.

“She did not appear to be interested in discussing the complexity at all,” said the Hammerhead presenter, Norival Figueira, a systems architect at the company. “She was just trying to make her point that PBT is complex.”

“That’s FUD and that’s trying to obfuscate the issue,” adds Hammerhead’s Keil on Morrow’s reaction to the presentation (Keil was not at the conference). “The reality is, as an MPLS switch we have less functionality than their routers so how could we be more complex? What we’re doing in this case is adding a simple software feature to allow PBT to be interworked into MPLS. It’s very possible that for Cisco or Juniper, it’s complex for them to do it.”

Hammerhead claims the carriers it is engaged with agree that the company’s PBT/MPLS/VPLS implementation is not complicated. But as is usual with Hammerhead, the company said it could not provide the names of any reference carriers.

“We’re not in a position, unfortunately, to comment publicly about customers we’re working with or even talking to,” Keil says. “Many are not yet public (with their PBT plans) because they don’t want to tip their hands for their own competitive reasons.”