sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services T1's, CSU's and DSU's Help me understand MPLS...

Hello,
I need your guys help again! I am getting recruited at work to negotiate our WAN migration! Yikes! But I am glad they are giving me the opportunity. But now I REALLY have to get up to speed on MPLS quick! Now I probably won't be too involved with the Technical stuff. I will be working more on Sales Agreements and contract negotiations as we are now searching for an alternative WAN provider. So please in laymen’s terms what is MPLS? How does it work? What are the advantages? Right now we are using DSL as our main connection to all our offices.

Thanks for your help! You guy's are great!

MPLS provides a fully meshed private IP network that can replace legacy networks, such as Frame Relay / ATM, and are specifically engineered for next generation IP applications including VoIP and video. MPLS can reduce total telecom costs by as much as 70% by combining voice-data-video on one network, elminate ALL intra office long distance costs, secure your data using VPN, has built in disaster recovery with it's fully meshed network. Basically it's the future of WANs as everything migrates to a more robust, scalable, less costly IP based solution. Let me know if you have any specific questions...

Doesn't MPLS Run over the frame network?

MPLS is native IP, it might go over a frame/ATM local loop for last mile connectivity, but the core network will ride over POS links or better...

A good thing to do is to white paper MPLS using google or any seach engine and you will get tons of good info. MPLS can get tricky on the carrier end but they specialize on it and you just have to let them know what you want prioritized (usually voice get's prioritized over everything else.
Hope this helps,

MPLS networks in our neighborhood have 4 class of service levels. Here only class 1 has QOS so if you do VoIP voice traffic make sure it's class 1 traffic.

what does 'fully 'meshed' private IP network'

mean? More specifically what does MESHED network mean>

Following info from Network Computing site article from Chris Lewis. Somewhat of a technical explanation but it explains it fairly well.

"A star network is the least fault tolerant. In our example, it's comprised of a connection from the Chicago head office to each distribution center. Typically, backbone links will carry more than 128 Kbps, making them difficult to back up with a typical dial-up ISDN solution (ISDN inverse multiplexing options and Multilink Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)-based lines are available that combine multiple ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI) lines in to one link, but standards in this area are still evolving).

The ring topology creates a daisy-chain effect, with each distribution center depicted as one point on a loop of lines connected in a circle. This configuration provides two leased lines to each location and, therefore, an alternate route should one line to the distribution center fail. It also makes dial backup of the backbone links unnecessary. The downside is that as the number of distribution centers grows, the probability that two links will fail simultaneously increases. In a ring topology, if two links fail, the distribution centers between the failures will be denied service.

An additional point of caution with the ring topology is that the links used to connect one distribution center to another need to have at least twice the capacity of the normal load. This is necessary for the WAN links to handle fault conditions properly. Consider what happens when a link fails in a ring topology. The traffic that was being routed over the downed link will find an alternate path through other links. If the links now carrying this traffic (in addition to their n ormal load), do not have sufficient capacity, the operation of the entire ring is adversely affected.

A fully meshed network is the ultimate in fault tolerance, but is very costly, so it's rarely implemented. In a fully meshed network, each distribution center has a link to every other, providing multiple alternate paths in the event of line failures. More commonly implemented is a partially meshed network. This topology is a cross between a ring and a fully meshed network in terms of the number of alternate paths implemented between distribution centers."

Fully meshed means that all locations can communicate directly to one another.

Partial mesh means that some locations can communicate directly with one another.

Hub and spoke or star network is when all remote locations can only communicate directly with the host location.

Note that for all scenarios above that just because sites do not communicate directly with each other does not preclude them from communicating indirectly with each other. E.g. remote site goes through the hub site to talk to another remote site.

Different carriers have different ways of implementing MPLS. Some run MPLS on a public IP network and others run MPLS on a private network while others do both.

An MPLS network is usually provisioned as a fully meshed network unless requested by the customer.