The MPLS WG Archive

["Robert Johnson" <rjohnson@adventnetworks.com>]

> I am talking daily to all major ISPs worldwide deploying MPLS and nobody
> mentioned "unified control plane" as the reason to introduce MPLS into
> their network. The major reason is to be able to use applications which
> MPLS offers (Traffic Eng, MPLS-VPNs, Circuit Transport, Hierarchical
> Routing etc ...)

How do you find the time? :) Regardless, you forgot the most important
motivator for many ISP MPLS implementations: politics. All of the applications
that you mentioned were possible (note they were possible, not necessarily
easy) using ATM. However, those ISPs that used ATM in this fashion and are now
moving to MPLS, for whatever reasons, need a unified control plane.
Alternatively, I suppose they could just throw away all of their old gear and
buy a completely new network. :)

> And if you are stuck with ATM switches which don't support MPLS your
> only option is to use generic MPLS encaplsulation over PVC to pass the
> data through.

I would hate to be "stuck" with such switches. :) However, often you are only
"stuck" with the hardware while there is a firmware upgrade path to provide
MPLS functionality. Again, there is always the new network option. :)

Robert Johnson
Director of Network Architecture
Advent Networks
(512) 397-4914