MPLS snowballing, alliance says

Hundreds of service providers are implementing MPLS, including six of the Big 7 U.S. carriers, says Andy Malis, chairman and president of the MPLS and Frame Relay Alliance.

“It’s been an enormous success even if it’s not all that immediately visible,” Malis says. “It’s everywhere. The only reason you don’t see it everywhere is because people don’t put out press releases when they deploy it. They just deploy it.”

Service providers are deploying the IETF’s RFC 2547bis MPLS-based VPN technology “left and right,” Malis says, only they’re keeping the MPLS aspects of it undercovers.

“They’re not calling it MPLS VPNs to their end customers; they’re calling it things like IP-enabled frame relay, or Layer 3 VPNs, or IP VPNs,” Malis says.

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Hundreds of service providers are implementing MPLS, including six of the Big 7 U.S. carriers, says Andy Malis, chairman and president of the MPLS and Frame Relay Alliance.

“It’s been an enormous success even if it’s not all that immediately visible,” Malis says. “It’s everywhere. The only reason you don’t see it everywhere is because people don’t put out press releases when they deploy it. They just deploy it.”

Service providers are deploying the IETF’s RFC 2547bis MPLS-based VPN technology “left and right,” Malis says, only they’re keeping the MPLS aspects of it undercovers.

“They’re not calling it MPLS VPNs to their end customers; they’re calling it things like IP-enabled frame relay, or Layer 3 VPNs, or IP VPNs,” Malis says.

Yet the IP-enabled frame relay services, which are very popular with AT&T and MCI customers, have a restriction, Malis notes: you can only run IP over frame relay.

 “If you’re doing anything else – if you’re doing LAN interconnect with LAN protocols in addition to IP – then of course you have to stay with the more traditional frame relay service,” Malis says.

Nevertheless, “anytime you see end services being deployed to customers that are IP VPNs, there’s really only two technologies that are being used these days to provide those services – either (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol version 3) or MPLS. And by far, the number of MPLS deployments greatly outstrips the number of deployments of L2TPv3,” he says.

Sprint is the only U.S. carrier of the Big 7 that is not deploying MPLS. It is using Cisco’s proprietary L2TPv3 technology to provision Layer 2 VPNs.

Sprint says it does not need the traffic engineering aspects of MPLS in the core so it does not need MPLS to provision its VPN services.

“With the excess capacity on SprintLink right now they don’t need traffic engineering,” Malis says. “They’re very much in the minority.”

Layer 2 MPLS VPNs and Ethernet Virtual Private LAN Services, each based on Draft Martini, are the next major applications to be enabled by MPLS, Malis says. Draft Martini defines a way to carry Layer 2 services -- like frame relay, ATM and Ethernet -- in MPLS Label Switched Paths.

“Level 3 is currently selling services based on the Martini draft,” Malis says. “Vivace (Networks, where Malis is chief technologist) has a customer in Asia with a nationwide Layer 2 VPN-over-MPLS network.”

The alliance is also working on improvements to voice-over-MPLS specifications so providers can interconnect voice gateways using MPLS instead of voice-over-IP encapsulation, which has a lot of overhead.

“They’ll be able to encapsulate voice directly in MPLS, skipping the whole VoIP part,” Malis says.
 
The alliance has also restarted work on an MPLS User-to-Network Interface (UNI). This work stalled due to market and economic factors, such as the current telecom slump caused by lack of service provider capital spending.

With the MPLS UNI, service providers could offer a direct MPLS service or pipe to the end customer, Malis says. The timeframe for progress and completion of version 2.0 of the MPLS UNI is gated again by market demand, Malis says.