Group tackles interoperability to give MPLS needed boost

Industry groups MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum have agreed to become one, a move leaders of the groups say will hasten much-needed Multi-protocol Label Switching services work by focusing more attention on solving specific interoperability problems.

In announcing the marriage, the forums last week also said that the Service Provider Council within the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance has issued a list of technical issues that it wants resolved. "It's the real-world stuff we have to deal with in a multi-vendor environment," says Doug O'Leary, chairman of the Service Provider Council and the director of enterprise solutions technology for Verizon.

For example, providers want standards that enable operations, administration and maintenance compatibility among frame relay, ATM and MPLS gear to address practical features such as latency, packet loss and jitter guarantees for carriers to offer to customers. "We want the ability to monitor and maintain the network end to end, not only for our own sanity but for service-level agreements," O'Leary says.

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Industry groups MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum have agreed to become one, a move leaders of the groups say will hasten much-needed Multi-protocol Label Switching services work by focusing more attention on solving specific interoperability problems.

In announcing the marriage, the forums last week also said that the Service Provider Council within the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance has issued a list of technical issues that it wants resolved. "It's the real-world stuff we have to deal with in a multi-vendor environment," says Doug O'Leary, chairman of the Service Provider Council and the director of enterprise solutions technology for Verizon.

For example, providers want standards that enable operations, administration and maintenance compatibility among frame relay, ATM and MPLS gear to address practical features such as latency, packet loss and jitter guarantees for carriers to offer to customers. "We want the ability to monitor and maintain the network end to end, not only for our own sanity but for service-level agreements," O'Leary says.

The providers want standards to smooth the interoperability of technologies and to promote interoperability among devices made by different vendors that support the same technology. This interoperability is key to maintaining carriers' basic tenet that they rely on no single vendor to provide their network infrastructure, he says.

Interoperability is key because major carriers have committed themselves financially to MPLS-based networks and must drive them to mature as quickly as possible.

While the yet-to-be-named merged industry group won't have the authority to create standards, its recommendations, known as implementation agreements, will likely become the basis for standards approved by other groups, says Erin Dunn, director of research services for Vertical Systems Group. "The IETF, the [International Telecommunication Union], the [Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers] need these feeder groups to send them implementation agreements," Dunn says.

This is even more important as IP-based services cut into frame relay, Dunn says. While frame relay dominates data services in the U.S. - totaling $9.2 billion last year - and is still growing, its dominance is starting to wane, according to Vertical Systems. Carriers need MPLS prepared to handle IP services customers demand, she says.

Despite the march toward MPLS and IP services, frame relay will continue to dominate data services through 2008, Dunn says, but increasingly frame relay services will run over MPLS backbones, which could arguably make them MPLS services. These services also will exhibit features more akin to IP than frame relay, such as any-to-any connectivity without need for virtual circuits.

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