Tuesday, June 1, 2004

Vendors to Demo VoIP over MPLS

The MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance and its member companies will begin interoperability testing next week at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). The results of the hot-stage event will be showcased as part of the Alliance's SUPERDemo at SUPERCOMM in Chicago, June 22-24. The event marks the first time that the MPLS & FR Alliance joins forces with the Multiservice Switching Forum (MSF) to publicly demonstrate how guaranteed voice quality can be offered over a resilient and verifiable MPLS network.



The event will test VoIP streams running over a QoS-enabled, hierarchical Virtual Private LAN Service (H-VPLS) across a resilient MPLS core network. During the event, new MPLS features such as LSP Ping and TraceRoute will be tested for the first time. Testing these features is critical as it helps simplify data plane failure detection and isolation processes during MPLS network operations.



"Testing Voice over IP traffic running over a hierarchical VPLS network is a big challenge, and very exciting for the industry," said Ananda Sen Gupta of Agilent Technologies, MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance Interoperability Committee chair and Board Member. "This will prove that enterprises can use Metro MPLS networks to have VoIP connectivity across an MPLS WAN. It is also important to test LSP Ping and TraceRoute, as these features enhance the Service Provider's toolkit, to pinpoint any faults that may occur in the data plane."http://www.mplsforum.org/