Qwest Offers MPLS Customers End-to-End Performance Reports

Qwest Communications International Inc.’s MPLS customers who want more detail on what’s happening with their traffic now can generate re-ports to get such detail. The company will begin offering this option next month.

Rather than offering a look at performance only in the MPLS core, however, the new reports will offer data on end-to-end connections, says Martin Capurro, director of global product management at Qwest, which has had this capability in development for more than two years. The service provider put together this end-to-end view for customers by pairing solution from Brix Networks, which measures from the customer’s network edge to the edge of Qwest’s private MPLS network, with a tool known as Network Health originally offered by Concord Communications (now part of Computer Associates Inc.), which looks at core network performance.

“So we’re taking the PE-to-PE measurement, and PE is the private edge, using the Computer Associates platform,” explains Capurro. “We’re then tak-ing a customer-specific measurement from CE to PE using Brix. And then we bring those together into a common report that then the customer can see … a complete [view of] latency, packet loss, jitter behavior through the entire network, including the loop.”

While customers have been able to have this kind of visibility in the past by employing network probes at their locations, Capurro says that can be a costly proposition and is not suitable for all customers. By comparison, the Qwest solution costs between $25 and $50 and uses existing routing infrastruc-ture along with the Brix/CA system it’s put together.

“It’s not a replacement for some in-line type of equipment that would give you a microscopic level of detail of your traffic profiles,” adds Capurro, “but for most customers going down to this 20/80 rule of what customers want to see, it really does do the basic things that people want to see in terms of network performance that would be very correlated to how their applications would be running over that network anyway.”

Capurro says understanding performance is more important now than ever given that more bandwidth-hungry and latency-sensitive traffic like video is moving into networks while at the same time many business customers face specific compliance issues.

Read more about the trend toward visibility into MPLS networks.

Brix Networks www.brixnet.com

Qwest Communications International Inc. www.qwest.com

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