MPLS Proposal Spawns IETF, ITU Turf War
Carolyn Duffy Marsan writes on NetworkWorld:
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is at odds with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) over a special transport network architecture the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is developing to allow Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) traffic to run over an Ethernet backbone. Among the network equipment vendors that have been contributing to the development are Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Fujitsu and Tellabs.More here.
The problem, according to the IETF, is that the ITU’s Transport-MPLS (T-MPLS) specification will not work with the billions of dollars in routers and switches that carriers have installed in recent years based on the IETF’s MPLS standards.
"The situation is catastrophic," says Stewart Bryant, IETF liaison to the ITU-T on MPLS issues and a technical leader at Cisco. "There’s a fundamental opportunity for a major train wreck" between the IETF's MPLS and the ITU-T’s T-MPLS.
posted by Fergie @ 9/01/2007 08:32:00 PM
1 Comments:
What is the solution then? As much as I would like to see what potential T-MPLS has over traditional MPLS, I'm wondering if it is too soon for such a change to occur. So many companies have just recently switched over to MPLS from Frame Relay/ATM that it would be hard to justify the cost of yet another system "upgrade" if you can even call it that.
-Christopher Wacker
http://mpls-experts.com
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