* Service interworking tops MPLS and Frame Relay Alliance survey
According to a survey of more than 200 service providers and vendors conducted by the MPLS and Frame Relay Alliance, the creation of an ATM-frame relay-Ethernet service interworking implementation agreement should take top priority on the alliance’s technology to-do list.
Respondents voted frame relay-to-MPLS interworking a close second.
The alliance surveyed attendees of last month’s Supercomm 2003 trade show, as well as its own members. The respondent mix was 38% service providers, 31% system vendors, 15% “others” (including representatives from universities and nonprofit organizations), 13% consultants and 3% component vendors. Enterprises were notably absent from the mix.
The survey was divided into two sets of questions. One set asked respondents about their “Interoperability” priorities and the other set of questions asked about “Applications and Deployment.”
Both service providers and others ranked multi-class traffic engineering and service-level agreements, as required for use in multiservice (converged) networks, at the very top. More than anything else, this result demonstrates unanimity of purpose for the basic groundwork of MPLS.
In terms of interoperability, it was not terribly surprising that the service providers and the non-service providers diverged on the importance of “Multi-provider, multi-area L2 VPNs.” This capability was ranked second by non-service providers. However, service providers, who have little to gain from enterprise customers using multiple carriers, ranked this item dead last.
Service providers and non-service providers also flip-flopped their rankings for virtual private LAN services (VPLS). VPLS was ranked second by service providers, but last (fifth) by others.
The two other areas received some, but less controversial, support. “Inter-area, inter-provider BGP/MPLS IP VPN” and “fast restoration” ended up in the third and fourth positions overall, and the two groups ranked each either third or fourth.
