Time for MPLS

We tried to explain to her that while she is growing older, her physical growth would be gradual — that her current wardrobe would continue to serve her well into the future.

With newer technologies like MPLS and VoIP, and MPEG4 and Windows Media 9 compression options, service providers are also growing in new directions and may seem to be outgrowing their existing networks. Of course, the movement to these new technologies and the phasing out of existing technologies will also be a gradual progression.

For example, while MPLS has allowed service providers to do backbone network traffic engineering and support the networkbased IP VPN connections that have become the springboard for their next-generation business services, MPLS is also a bridge to existing networks and services like frame relay and ATM. And those two popular, revenue-producing services are expected to fit many customers and applications quite nicely for some time.

As I mention in this month’s cover story, the Holy Grail of MPLS is to allow service providers to collapse all their legacy and newer IP traffic onto a single backbone. But that appears to be a long time off for most service providers, which today are more focused on seamlessly exchanging traffic between separate MPLS- and ATM-based backbones.

Still, there’s little question that MPLS is of central importance to the public network and will continue to play this key role going forward, as the technology pushes out from the network core also to occupy carriers’ edge networks to help scale Ethernet services and support a variety of new types and qualities of service.

But, again, it will take a while until all the pieces are in place to enable guaranteedquality, end-to-end Ethernet services and mixed protocol services over MPLS, especially for situations in which more than one service provider is involved in delivering the connectivity. And a wholesale migration by all service providers to single MPLS backbones is also expected to take several years.

To take this tale full circle, I asked my daughter Friday morning how it feels to be a four-year-old. She answered: “You know, I’m almost a woman now.”

Yes, in time.

Until next time,

Paula Bernier
Editor in Chief

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines