Beyond Bandwidth: Bringing More Visibility to Customer Networks

As Qwest Communications International Inc.’s recent rollout of an offering that provides MPLS customers with an end-to-end look at their networks may indicate, there is a larger trend toward visibility into these networks to better enable provisioning, troubleshooting and network planning.

“The trend is to layer additional management services on the circuit, instead of offering only bandwidth,” says Todd Lattanzi, senior product manager with ADTRAN Inc. “One of the biggest drivers we have seen [is] service providers promoting the ability to support end-to-end quality of service starting at the customer's router, honoring the marking through the network, and delivering services that could not be delivered in this manner with traditional frame relay or Internet backbones. VoIP is one of the most natural drivers for end-to-end QoS. However, a number of the service providers offer four or five levels of QoS through the network enabling prioritization of data applications as well.”

Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, agrees that the OAM aspects of MPLS networks are of very high importance to both carriers and their enterprise customers. To address that requirement, he notes, Alcatel-Lucent last June launched the 5650 CPAM (control plane assurance manager), which enables visibility for service providers to understand what’s going on in the IP/MPLS control plane and the interaction between routers in their networks, and also has a toolkit for its 5620 Service Aware Manager that enables service providers to give their customers both self-provisioning and management capabilities so that they can look at SLAs, bandwidth profiles and more. Newell adds that Alcatel-Lucent developed the customer self-management adjunct to the 5620 SAM as a toolkit to enable service providers to develop their own portals around it, or to work with Alcatel-Lucent’s professional services team to do so.

MegaPath Inc., which has been offering MPLS VPN service since the spring of 2003, has a customer portal that its users can check out to see availability and mean time to repair, says Greg Davis, vice president of product marketing at the service provider. The company also has shown performance statistics for some customers more on a custom basis using Cisco Systems Inc. service assurance agent equipment and tools from InfoVista, he says.

The next big thing in IP/MPLS management has to do with opening application-aware monitoring to enterprise customers, says Newell, adding that Alcatel-Lucent is seeing a lot of requests for this in service provider RFPs. Enterprises don’t just want to know what’s connected; they also want to know how much bandwidth was used by each division of their organization, says Newell, adding the service provider Masergy Communications Inc. talked about this trend at a recent MPLS conference.

One application that may be driving the demand is VoIP, which Davis of MegaPath says takes full advantage of the QoS capabilities of MPLS and also impacts how carriers must architect their networks given that VoIP needs to be prioritized and take the shortest path so latency doesn’t affect its quality.

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