Guest Column
IP/MPLS is the Future,
But We Mustn’t Forget The Past
(continued)
Another
contributor to the need for higher system and network availability
is an expected boom in the demand for packet voice applications as
users migrate toward integrated communications. Today’s fault-prone
multiservice architectures are not ideal for carrying voice,
however. The reason is that voice degradation caused by downtime or
latency is immediately perceptible to users. By contrast, slight
disruptions in data applications such as LAN file transfers and
e-mail go largely unnoticed.
Finally, from a
network efficiency standpoint, the internal switching buses of the
installed base of multiservice backbone switches—close to $20 billion
worth, according to Dell’Oro Research—are ATM cell-based. Formatting
traffic into 53-byte ATM cells across the network results in excess
overhead and bandwidth consumption. Building more efficient
packet-over-fiber networks requires equipment with new architectures
that forward traffic in frame-based formats and in a
protocol-independent fashion.
When making capital investment decisions going forward, then, service
providers should expect telephony-grade reliability in switching
equipment that supports a mix of network and management protocols.
Next-generation multiservice equipment achieves the reliability of the
public switched telephone network (PSTN) in large part by modular
software designs that eliminate a single point of system and network
failure, unlike the monolithic operating system code in today’s
switches.
Figure 1. QoS Technologies that
Service Providers Plan to Implement By
Mid-2002
Source: Infonetics
Research Corporation
