* MFA Forum work to iron out MPLS VPN geographic coverage issues
One of the big stumbling blocks to network-based MPLS VPN services is geographic coverage.
If you go to a single provider and you have a far-flung business, chances are your carrier won’t be able to reach all the sites without using another carrier’s network to help get there.
If you are trying to do this today, chances are carriers don’t have formal network-to-network interfaces in place to enable them to hand off traffic to each other without losing quality of service markers or without subjecting the traffic to security threats.
The MFA Forum, a merger of the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and the ATM Forum, is working on an interconnection standard that would deal with these issues. The proposal being worked on would define how QoS would be transferred from network to network and how customer data and carrier signaling would be kept private. All of these are essential to creating services that can reach all sites on international corporate networks and that support service-level agreements.
The forum is also working on how to get various access technologies to interoperate over an MPLS core network. It is attempting to set up frame relay-to-ATM over MPLS, ATM-to-Ethernet over MPLS and frame relay-to-PPP over MPLS. These connections will enable standardized ways for individual sites to connect to an MPLS VPN service via whatever access method is available. That way, businesses can switch to MPLS VPNs without altering their access lines, making a migration to MPLS smoother.
To make migrations smoother for service providers the forum is working on a standard for converting ATM signaling to MPLS signaling. This will make it simpler for carriers to leave ATM gear in their networks as they add MPLS equipment and have them interoperate.
MFA Forum members at a meeting of the group last week said standards for all these capabilities could be ready sometime next year, and some as early as the end of this year.
When the are in place, MPLS VPN service should become more available and attractive.
