Tiernan, You are indeed correct. Giles did indeed mention that we are running MPLS on our Juniper M160 core network and I am rolling out MPLS VPNs on a wider scale across Europe. This service is not currently available for customers of Level 3 as the Juniper equipment is not currently capable of supporting MPLS VPNs (Juniper have a release of software that should cover this functionality early next 2001). There are work-arounds to allow end-to-end MPLS VPNs but these will not be implemented for customers as they do not scale. We will be pursuing further work in this area early next year. Regards, James Cumming IP Core Network Engineer Level 3 Communications -----Original Message----- From: tiernan ray [mailto:tiernan@tiernan.net] Sent: 05 December 2000 15:24 To: Christian Kuhtz; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Is MPLS based VPN really feasible in real world situation? I don't mean to intrude, as I'm a journalist who lurks, not a carrier representative. But I thought I'd point out that at last week's "IP Over WDM" conference in Paris, Giles Heron, of Level 3 Communications, remarked that the company has MPLS running in its Juniper M160 routers and that the firm has been running MPLS VPNs in London for six months. Heron remarked the gating factor at this point is getting the firm to price such a service for commercial deployment, and, on the technical side, the service can not be run out to the edge of the network until there is compatibility between Juniper and Cisco's respective label distribution protocol (LDP) software. Once this happens, Giles expects the company will try to run MPLS across the entire network between the Juniper switches and Cisco 7500 routers. I'm not really qualified to assess any of this information, but thought I'd offer it to the group since I came across it at the conference. Tiernan Ray Journalist SmartMoney.com tiernan@tiernan.net Christian Kuhtz wrote:
Hi Nanog,
We've noticed that Global one has already begin to sell its MPLS based VPN, but we heard the Cisco people says that MPLS can't be widely deployed. Does anyone know any further detail of Global one's MPLS based VPN, is it real? Any additional operational cost than traditional VPN ?
Err. who from Cisco said it can't be widely deployed?
-- Christian Kuhtz <ck@arch.bellsouth.net> -wk, <ck@gnu.org> -hm Sr. Architect, Engineering & Architecture, BellSouth.net, Atlanta, GA, U.S. "I speak for myself only."