What advantages does MPLS offer?
MPLS gives a company more flexibility so it can engineer its own traffic and customize traffic control to get more use out of its bandwidth. It also supports prioritizing your data. You can tag different types of data with specific headers that indicate the importance of that data, so when it gets to the router, it knows which data needs to go first and which data needs to go in which direction more quickly. That allows you to apply quality of service guarantees because it decreases your latency and jitter, and supports things such as multicast video and voice.
It also reduces your CPU router requirements, which can speed up the rate at which the data is transferred, giving you more bang for your buck and more bandwidth.
In addition, MPLS is just as secure as any legacy service, and Virtual Private Network (VPN) services are better than you would have with your typical customer-based IP, because the provider supplies services, which reduces the management of the network required by the customer. The provider can pretty much handle it all for you.
In addition, you can continue to expand your network by adding more elements, and you don’t have to get rid of your existing network. There’s no up front cost; if you want to add equipment, you don’t have to change your entire network or get rid of your existing equipment. You just add on the newest and greatest things, and all of the different types of protocols that you run can all run under MPLS. It’s very versatile and simple because the network is managed by the provider.
Is it an expensive technology?
To construct and implement your own MPLS network from the ground up could be quite costly, and a lot of smaller to medium-sized businesses don’t have the resources to do that. But if a company wants to pay a provider, it can do it at a pretty reasonable cost, and the provider can implement the MPLS network to accommodate the company’s existing legacy network.
The provider would manage your network from end to end, accommodating most bandwidth requirements, across the provider’s core. And with a provider whose core is fully converged with MPLS, you can have access to its cloud and expand your network across their entire coverage area. It’s just a matter of the provider coming in and overlaying its MPLS on top of your network to allow you to get more out of your services and increase your business.
Brad Shannon is a senior sales engineer with Comcast. Reach him at [email protected].