* Are top telecom buyers really that ignorant of carriers' IP VPN services?
In a newsletter last month, we looked at a study by a financial firm that said the largest businesses are still ducking IP VPN services because they don’t want to subject their networks to a best-effort service.
In a newsletter last month, we looked at a study by a financial firm that said the largest businesses are still ducking IP VPN services because they don’t want to subject their networks to a best-effort service.
A link to that newsletter is here: http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/vpn/2005/0704vpn1.html?rl
We questioned whether presumably well-informed telecom decision-makers at the Fortune 500 firms that took part in the study could be so ignorant of the QoS offerings from major and minor carriers that offer network-based VPN services, and some readers agreed. One reader raised the excellent point that if this were the case, then these executives would have somehow missed a major shift in network services offered by carriers.
In an effort to wean customers away from traditional network services such as frame relay and ATM, carriers have been touting their MPLS VPN services that allow customers to keep their frame and ATM access lines but still have sites served by them become nodes on a VPN.
The whole point of this for service providers is to streamline their networks by converging all types of services onto a single network. Primarily this means diverting voice traffic to an IP backbone. Voice must have QoS and this is what service providers are engineering their networks for.
Service providers are steaming ahead with further enhancements to their current IP VPN services, so it seems likely that the earlier pessimistic report drew from a sample that wasn’t representative. (IP VPN service enhancements are coming within the next month from both Verizon and AT&T. Stay tuned.)
One credible reader, who researches corporate network services buying, said this: “I can assure you that very major corporations are moving to IP VPNs for critical applications. Not all corporations, and not all applications, but that would be true of any technology shift.” That is probably a more accurate assessment of the status of network-based VPN services.
