Carrier boundaries challenge MPLS VPNs

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: OPTICAL NETWORKING
08/08/05

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Need for an MPLS interconnect arises to ensure service reach,
  consistency
* Links related to Optical Networking
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Carrier boundaries challenge MPLS VPNs

By Jim Duffy

Enterprise customers looking to utilize multiple carriers to
provide global reach for their MPLS VPNs might find themselves
thrown for a loop.

Differences in the way carriers assign QoS attributes to
separate MPLS paths can result in service inconsistency. And
because no single carrier has a footprint in every possible
locale an organization might have to reach, each has to
establish MPLS interconnect agreements with other carriers that
might have configured VPN QoS profiles much differently.

"Not every carrier can have a point of presence in every single
possible location," says Andy Malis, chairman of the MFA Forum,
which is defining specifications to resolve the MPLS
interconnect issue between carriers. "And at this point, the
interconnections that are happening are basically for best
effort [service] only."

The MFA Forum began work late last year on an MPLS
cross-boundary interconnect to enable QoS, privacy and security,
Malis says. The forum expects its initial specification to be
published in the first half of 2006.

"We recognize in the standards community that there are
deficiencies in the standard to be able to have a full-service
MPLS interconnect in between carriers," Malis says.

Vendors are also attempting to tackle the problem in
associations such as the new IPSphere Forum, which spawned from
Juniper's Infranet Initiative Council, and with single-vendor
products such as Cisco's MPLS inter-provider features for its
routers .

The forum is looking to extend work done by the IETF to define
up to eight service classes in an MPLS header, using
Differentiated Service (Diff-Serv) code point markings, in a
single carrier's network. The MFA is looking to broaden this
specification so it works on an inter-provider basis, as well,
Malis says.

"The hard part is going to be on the carrier's part to have some
amount of alignment on what the meanings are of the Diff-Serv
markings in the headers," he says.

There's a possibility, Malis says, that two carriers don't use
the Diff-Serv markings to mean the same thing. In that case, the
carriers will have to figure out how to resolve this by
re-marking packets at a router at the boundary of the network.

Malis says there is text in the IETF's RFC 2547bis specification
(PDF ) for MPLS-based Layer 3 VPNs that states how to establish
such interconnections. But that is for best-effort Layer 3 VPNs
only.

So the forum is working on a template to function as a guide for
mapping a subset of services between different service providers
not only for Layer 3 MPLS VPNs, but for all MPLS services: Layer
2 virtual private LAN Services (VPLS), point-to-point
pseudo-wires, traffic-engineered label switched path
intercarrier trunks and VoIP among them.

The need for a VPLS network-to-network interface to extend
switched Layer 2 VPN services came up at the recent Supercomm
2005 conference in Chicago.

"There's a lot more going on than just the Layer 3 VPNs, so we
really need a more general MPLS-based interconnect," Malis says.

After the initial phase is released in the first half of next
year, the forum hopes to release updates - or subsequent phases
- every six to nine months thereafter.

In the meantime, some carriers have established their own MPLS
interconnect services in which they hammer out specific
wholesale peering arrangements with other carriers to ensure
service consistency and global reach. InfoNet, for example,
rolled out its service four years ago to extend the reach and
service capabilities for multinational corporations via global
class-of-service (CoS) data services across multiple IP VPN
backbones.

BtNAccess, a retail and wholesale carrier in Reston, Va., has
MPLS interconnect agreements with 15 other carriers in North and
South America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East for end-to- end
VPN connectivity to 35 countries. And Global Crossing last fall
unveiled its iMPLS service, which allows MPLS-based service
providers to essentially resell Global Crossing's IP VPN service
beyond their own regions with guaranteed QoS.

"You can expect feature and CoS and QoS transparency consistent
with RFC 2547 standards, provided the implementation is done
properly," says Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer and
executive vice president at Global Crossing. "Because [iMPLS] is
a product of the wholesale side of the house, it behooves us to
make sure that there is feature transparency, QoS, CoS and
[service-level agreements] between networks. It's not just a way
for us to provide an extended-reach capability to our enterprise
customers."

Christie says Global Crossing has about 20 partners for iMPLS.

Carriers say MPLS interconnect is more of a challenge for
carriers than it is for corporations. Billing, settlement and
customer SLA assurance are all matters carriers have to agree
on, while the customer usually deals with only one carrier for
service and support.

If a customer doesn't receive contracted SLAs, some carrier
within the chain won't get paid.

"All these [reach and QoS] things are addressed as you're going
through the opportunity itself," says Alessandro Bucelli, MPLS
VPN product manager at BtNAccess. "Usually companies that are
considering MPLS VPNs are intelligent enough to realize that one
company can't provide you connectivity to the whole world. They
understand the whole partnership model."

Some analysts say MPLS VPNs are still too new to users for them
to be concerned about inter-carrier service consistency. They
also try to deal with only one or two carriers, not several.

"Most enterprises are still kind of going, 'What's MPLS again,
and how is it going to help me?'" says Johna Till Johnson,
president of Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist.
"Inter-carrier MPLS is sort of like, 'Wow, that would be really
cool if I could figure out why I needed it.' There's no
absolutely earth-shattering business driver for multi-carrier
MPLS from an enterprise standpoint."

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_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Jim Duffy

Jim Duffy is managing editor of Network World's service provider
equipment coverage
<http://www.networkworld.com/topics/service-providers.html>. He
has 18 years of high-tech reporting experience, including over
12 years at Network World. Previously, he was senior editor at
Computer Systems News and associate editor/reporter at
Electronic News and MIS Week. He can be reached at
<mailto:jduffy@nww.com>.
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Nokia
Empower Your Mobile Enterprise

Nokia believes that business mobility will fundamentally change
the way work gets done-and for the better. To allow the entire
organization to get the most from this paradigm shift in
productivity, Nokia Enterprise Solutions focuses on delivering
increased efficiency through enhanced mobility. Learn more by
downloading this white paper today!
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=109960
_______________________________________________________________
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Find out if compensation alone is keeping network professionals
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