Wireless, MPLS create a buzz at smaller N+I

ATLANTA - Last week's NetWorld+Interop show drew smaller crowds and fewer vendors than in years past, but debates and discussions over the latest technologies - such as wireless security and Multi-protocol Label Switching - were as spirited as ever.

Show organizers had trouble filling one exhibit hall at the Georgia World Congress Center, whereas in better times they packed two.

This year's 180 exhibitors represent a 50% dropoff from last year. Interop officials said they had yet to tally an attendance figure late last week but expected 30,000 - down 40% from a year ago. The crowd appeared smaller than that, and many in attendance were questioning its future.

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Vendors that showed up did not skimp on the usual marketing extravagances, such as dancers and magicians. Although Cisco, Microsoft and others that traditionally erect giant booths had much lower profiles, choosing to rent tiny booths or to conduct all meetings off the show floor.

Kicking things off on Tuesday, Foundry Networks CEO Bobby Johnson and Sprint President Ronald LeMay gave keynotes outlining the futures of wired and wireless networks, respectively.

Johnson said Ethernet would extend its dominance beyond LANs into WANs in the near future, as 10G bit/sec Ethernet becomes a cost-effective alternative to SONET in metropolitan-area networks. He also said the growth of 1000Base-T on servers and the desktop will spur the growth of 10G Ethernet in corporations.

"There's no magic to 10-Gigabit Ethernet technology," Johnson said. "The real magic will be getting the cost out of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, but that will happen." While 10G Ethernet costs as much as $75,000 per port now, Johnson said, he expects that to fall below $5,000 by 2006.

Sprint's LeMay said wireless is key to the carrier's road map for new services that let end users move smoothly from a wired network to a wireless one.

Sprint is working to address corporate customers' concerns about wireless security, but he said more immediate attention is being paid to user expectations about speed, reliability and quality of wireless services. Customers should expect weaker service-level agreements (SLA) for wireless services, LeMay said.

"It's not realistic to demand the same performance criteria in wireless and wired networks," he said.

One of the best-attended areas of the show was the wireless security zone at iLabs, a NetWorld+Interop-sponsored space for highlighting technologies. Demonstrations in that area were meant to show the benefits of wireless technology, how it might be exploited by attackers and the choices for blocking them, said Jan Trumbo, an iLabs volunteer and senior partner at Opus One of Tucson, Ariz.

Currently, running an IP Security (IPSec) VPN is the best way to safeguard a wireless network from intruders, said Leonard Levy, a consultant in Atlanta.

Levy urged network security staff to patrol their wired buildings in search of rogue access points installed by technophiles who could build wireless LANs within their offices and breach corporate security. "It's much better for a corporation to step in and set up policies and security before there's a problem," he said.

But lesser protection than IPSec might be acceptable if the wireless data being sent isn't sensitive. For instance, scanners in a warehouse transmitting inventory numbers to a database might not warrant the expense of elaborate security, said Stephen Cristol, who runs Formalis Software, an Atlanta Web developer. "You have to weigh the cost benefit. Five thousand dollars may be too much for what you're trying to protect," he said.

"Wireless security is like an oxymoron" in military circles, said Jim McEwan, COO of Technology Advancement Group (TAG), in Dulles, Va. Any transmission of data that emits electromagnetic waves is considered unsecure, including copper wiring, and wireless broadcasts are the worst, he said. "It's like nonprotected sex."

McEwan said wireless technology is too valuable to ignore. "The question is who will come up with the secure solution," he said.

A prevalent rumbling at the show was that a new encryption scheme for wireless networks had been approved by the secretive National Security Agency and would be announced soon.

MPLS gets a showing

Another iLabs event had the nuts and bolts of MPLS on display in an interoperability showcase. Meanwhile, users and carriers debated the merits of the technology during several conference sessions.

MPLS is an Internet Engineering Task Force standard for routing traffic where labels are attached to packets, indicating that the traffic is part of a series. Labeled packets are forwarded along paths, which can be as secure as private circuits. The labeled packets also can be prioritized, providing end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and performance guarantees.

The iLabs MPLS lab included switches, routers and other gear from vendors such as Cisco, Extreme Networks, Foundry, IP Infusion, Juniper Networks, Laurel Networks and Riverstone Networks. The network demonstrated interoperability of MPLS-based Layer 3 VPN and virtual LAN technology, which involves the deployment of Layer 2 Ethernet ports at the edge and MPLS in the network core.

"With this kind of network, [businesses] can sit at various sites - regardless of how close together they are - and still get the feeling of local connectivity," said Bill Jensen, IS network services consultant for the University of Wisconsin's Division of Information Technology and iLabs team leader for the MPLS interoperability demonstration.

At a separate conference session, carriers made their cases for or against the technology.

"We like to think of MPLS as a solution waiting for a problem," said Barry Tishgart, director of product management for Sprint. Because Sprint meets the requirements of its customers, as written out in its SLAs, "MPLS is not a necessity to meet a glaring customer need," Tishgart said.

While Tishgart said MPLS is good for congestion management and failover routing, he also noted that MPLS would add complexity to Sprint's backbone and that costs of rolling it out would hit customers' pocketbooks.

Tim Halpern, product director of frame relay and ATM at AT&T, said MPLS-based services could offer more resiliency than frame relay networks without forcing customers to change their premises routers.

"Disaster recovery with a lot of [frame relay private virtual circuits] is very hard to do," Halpern said, whereas IP-based services with MPLS in the backbone could help customers route around network outages more quickly.

Because the appeal of frame relay was that it supported multiple protocols, its value has declined as the world converges on IP, Halpern added, which makes MPLS-based IP VPNs a good replacement for frame relay.

"I'm looking into MPLS because I like its resiliency and its ability to control traffic," said Terry Dymek, director of global telecommunications at EMC. He plans to use MPLS-based services from AT&T and Equant.

Another user called MPLS a central part of his convergence plan, during a separate session on VoIP. "We decided that we had to do MPLS in order to do VoIP," said John Ridley, senior technical architect of planning and technology for Coca-Cola. He said the protocol will provide the best WAN QoS guarantees, which will be essential for a distributed telephony network such as Coca-Cola's, with 72,000 employees all over the world. "Go do MPLS," he urged others. "It's time."

Products, services on tap

Also at the show, Sprint's Tishgart gave a sneak preview of news the carrier will formally announce at Internet World, which starts Sept. 30 in New York. Sprint will roll out service classes for its IP VPN offering and a managed IP PBX service.

IP class of service will be a managed-router offering using Differentiated Services (Diff-Serv) to distinguish four classes of IP packet: voice, video and two classes for data. The Diff-Serv markers will give packets appropriate preference as they are routed through the network, Tishgart said.

Managed IP Telephony will include installation and management of a Cisco or Nortel IP PBX and manage traffic to ensure good voice quality between desktop phones and PBXs.

"You want your IP PBX and your IP service provider to work well together. If they're [provided by] the same company, you know who to go to to fix the quality of service if there's a problem," said Steven Taylor, principal with Distributed Networking Associates and a Network World columnist.

Sprint has not set prices.

Fellow carrier Savvis Communications previewed a service it will announce this week: Guaranteed IP, a managed IP VPN service that ensures enough bandwidth for bursty traffic. With Savvis' earlier offerings, customers would pay for a certain bandwidth and be allowed to burst above that level with the understanding that the bursts would receive best-effort service. Guaranteed IP means that if traffic bursts, bandwidth will always be available to handle it. Savvis did not supply pricing last week.

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