FREMONT, Calif. -- The MFA Forum announced today that 15 vendors featuring more than 30 devices will demonstrate interoperability, resiliency, multicast and Quality of Service (QoS) assured MPLS network services to support emerging triple-play and business applications. Taking place this week at MPLS World Congress in Paris, France, the demonstration can be viewed in the Interop Event Area. The test event was organized by the European Advanced Networking Test Center in Berlin, Germany (EANTC) with support from the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) and endorsed by the MFA Forum. Participants, of which four are taking part for the first time, include Agilent Technologies, Alcatel, BATM Advanced Communications, Ciena Corporation, Cisco Systems, Huawei Technologies, Ixia, Lucent Technologies, MRV Communications, Nortel, RAD Data Communications, Riverstone Networks, Spirent Communications, Tellabs and Tpack.

The demonstration, showcasing the results of a hot-staging event that took place at EANTC labs in Berlin last month, will focus on converged residential and business network services implemented and supported by an MPLS network. The demand for a converged, multi-vendor backbone supporting new and legacy services, requires stable protocols that can offer resilience and detection along side packet prioritization, bandwidth reservation and guaranteed delivery. For more details, a white paper is available online at http://mfaforum.org/tech/MPLSWorldCongress2006-WhitePaper.pdf

"MPLS multi-vendor interoperability remains a strong concern for service providers, as converged backbones are being increasingly deployed," said Carsten Rossenhoevel, Managing Director Research & Manufacturer Testing EANTC AG, and MFA Interoperability Working Group chair. "We revisited network protection interoperability and verified Quality of Service (QoS) enabled routing, a mandatory precondition for the upcoming RFCs on integrated MPLS quality and differentiated services (DiffServ-TE). The test helped to improve the interoperability readiness of participating vendors substantially."

MFA Forum