Vendors to Demo MPLS Interoperability

FREMONT, Calif. -- The MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance (MFA) announced today that ten vendors will demonstrate interoperability and scalability of Layer 2 MPLS Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), as well as the interoperability of MPLS Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) capabilities at MPLS World Congress in Paris, France, February 16-18, 2005. The test event has been organized by European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) and endorsed by the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance. Participants include: Agilent Technologies, Alcatel, Ciena Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Ixia, MRV, Native Networks, RAD Data Communications, Resolute Networks and Riverstone Networks. The demonstration, showcasing the results of a private hot-stage event that occurred last week at EANTC, will include multi-vendor hierarchical Virtual Private LAN Service (H-VPLS) and MPLS Ethernet, TDM and ATM pseudowire implementations and scalability, as well as MPLS ping and traceroute interoperability.

For more detail, a white paper is available online at: http://mplsforum.org/tech/MPLSWorldCongress2005-WhitePaper.pdf

"With this proven H-VPLS interoperability between vendors, multi-point Ethernet services over MPLS are now becoming a viable option even in large scale installations," said Carsten Rossenhoevel (EANTC), MFA Interoperability Working Group chair. "In addition, we saw that MPLS OAM - strongly requested by service providers - already worked between participating vendors."

The public showcase in Paris will also highlight point-to-point VPN services over MPLS verified to scale to more than 2,000 parallel pseudo-wires. Hierarchical VPLS scalability will be verified in the core network, supporting 50 virtual customer networks running in parallel. Each virtual network will be extended to a further 25 spoke sites (H-VPLS PE extensions), and 4,000 emulated hosts in total. The event also demonstrated implementation of Ethernet, TDM and ATM pseudowire support in remote access equipment as well as PE devices.

MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance

European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC)