WAN Services /

C&W bolstering net with OC-192, MPLS

By Denise Pappalardo
Network World, 12/17/01

Cable & Wireless announced last week that it's beefing up its IP backbone with more capacity and network management support that will eventually lead to new services.

The service provider is deploying Juniper Networks' M160 Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) routers throughout its network. The devices support OC-192 (10G bit/sec) transmission speeds and MPLS traffic engineering.

C&W has seven Juniper devices deployed between the U.S. and Europe and plans to have 23 OC-192 nodes installed by the end of 2003, says David Garbin, chief engineer, network architecture.

"This is our first step in moving our architecture from IP over ATM to a worldwide MPLS infrastructure," Garbin says. "MPLS is the way we're going to engineer traffic delivery at the core of our network. MPLS offers less overhead than ATM and scales to OC-192."

The main advantage for customers is that C&W can better support OC-48 dedicated services in the cities where it has upgraded to OC-192. But initially this will only benefit large enterprise users and other carriers, says Steven Harris, an IDC analyst.

Customers with content-rich Web traffic are also expected to be more interested in OC-48 connections, which is a growing customer base for the service provider. Last year C&W acquired Web hosting service provider Digital Island and is also in the process of buying Exodus Communications.

But only a handful of C&W business users will require OC-48 links to the Internet, Harris says.

"It's a little surprising that Cable & Wireless is rolling out OC-192 throughout its network," Harris says.

"It must mean that the company's traffic levels are such that they require increased bandwidth at the core." Harris says the majority of the company's business customers are small to midsize businesses that typically do not generate as much traffic as Fortune 500 customers.

AT&T and WorldCom have also deployed OC-192 and support MPLS, but not as many service providers are supporting MPLS.

OC-192/MPLS upgrade
Cable & Wireless is upgrading its network to support OC-192 and Multi-protocol Label Switching. It has the necessary nodes in:

•	London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Washington, D.C., and New York.
•	In March 2002 there will be five more nodes in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Anaheim, Calif., and Santa Clara.
•	By year-end 2003 there will be 11 more nodes, for a total of 23, in Germany, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.

In addition to using MPLS for traffic engineering, C&W is also planning new services based on its MPLS deployment. In the first quarter C&W will begin rolling out an MPLS IP VPN service based on the IETF RFC 2547. This is a network-based VPN service that lets a customer store routing tables for their VPN on devices throughout the C&W network.

While not many providers are offering VPN services based on the IETF's specification, it's expected to become a more popular technology next year.

C&W is also planning a voice-over-IP service that would be coupled with its MPLS IP VPN offering.