Two industry forums plan to merge in hopes of speeding the creation of multi-service, multi-vendor carrier networks that blend frame relay, ATM and MPLS into their offerings to customers.

The boards of the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum have agreed to become a single organization, with the marriage expected to take place by year-end if member companies agree. The groups haven't come up yet with a name for the merged organization. Each group has about 50 vendor members, with an overlap of about 20 members.

Both organizations make recommendations about how vendors should implement technical standards so equipment made by different vendors will interoperate. Their work has already overlapped and the two organizations have scheduled their meetings in the same cities at the same times for the past 18 months.

For example, they have already worked together on defining how to accomplish frame relay-to-ATM and Ethernet-to-ATM interworking over MPLS core networks. This type of agreement is essential to using gear from multiple vendors to provide a service that supports frame relay or Ethernet access to an MPLS network and maintains the characteristics of each technology across the network, ATM Forum president Rick Townsend says.

Such recommendations are forwarded to standards bodies such as the International Telecommunications Union and IETF that have turned them into formal recommended standards. They have also created these agreements for technical areas that were not being addressed at all by standards bodies, such as specifications for carrying voice and voice signaling over MPLS networks.

Over its history, the ATM forum has produced more than 200 such implementation agreements, the Frame Relay Forum came up with 20 and the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance with four.

Operating as a single group, the proposed forum will run more efficiently and make it easier for other bodies to deal with them on issues that span both their areas of expertise, says Andy Malis, chairman and president of the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance.

When each technology was in its infancy, service providers based entire networks on them. ATM became the preferred core network transport, and as IP becomes the favored protocol, MPLS is replacing it. Frame relay and ATM are being pushed to the edge of networks as access technologies, so interworking with each other and MPLS are essential, Malis says.