MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies

15.4. INTERPROVIDER CAPABILITY

Today the MPLS-based services described in this book are predominantly used in a single provider, single customer mode. That is to say, typically when data from a customer arrives on the service provider's network, it is carried across that network and is delivered to another site of that same customer. Usually the only common denominator that allows traffic to pass between different end customers and across multiple service providers is the Internet. This is a problem because the Internet does not have any guarantees with respect to bandwidth or treatment of packets at each hop. Also roaming corporate workers usually only have access to their corporate network via a VPN solution that runs over the Internet, which can result in poor performance for certain applications. Because many large corporations have presence in all corners of the world and increasingly need connectivity between sites to run their business applications, seamless global connectivity with quality guarantees is an important requirement.

However, no single service provider has the combination of global coverage and high penetration within each country required to offer such customers seamless global MPLS-based services. In some cases, certain service providers do have interconnection arrangements for MPLS-based services. To date, such arrangements are very fragmented, typically involving isolated pairs of service providers. As yet, there is no general interprovider connectivity ...