France Telecom Deploys VPLS-TE with Atrica

France Telecom has implemented Virtual Private LAN Service with Traffic Engineering (VPLS-TE) capability in its network, enabling it to set and tune any specific bandwidth per each end user site per application, while utilizing guaranteed pre-provisioned -- yet flexibly controlled -- core bandwidth resources.


The VPLS-TE capability is based on a co-developed algorithm by France Telecom and Atrica that adds carrier-class traffic engineering attributes to standard VPLS capabilities to deliver carrier-class, traffic engineered E-LAN services with hard Service Level Agreements (SLAs) per application. VPLS-TE will enable France Telecom to guarantee to its clients performance-based solutions for LAN-to-LAN connectivity.


The bandwidth-guaranteed, flexible VPLS-TE service offered by the jointly developed VPLS-TE capability incorporates ingress and egress policing at every point and direction, operator-configurable ingress and egress bandwidth per site per application, and operator-configurable core bandwidth. Its broadcast policing capability allows carriers to control broadcast traffic, further optimizing the performance of the network.


Atrica said standard VPLS-based solutions defined by the IETF are best effort services that don't allow carriers to guarantee SLAs or Quality of Service (QoS). These VPNs specify only full mesh, any-to-any connectivity, offering little to no flexibility in connectivity models. In contrast, Atrica's bandwidth-conditioned VPLS-TE delivers guaranteed SLAs and hard QoS with sub-50ms service protection and is user-configurable, based on different traffic patterns. This flexible connectivity model allows a carrier to define how much bandwidth they want to reserve for the core, and how much should be reserved for specific VPNs, which can significantly improve bandwidth optimization and support their own unique revenue models.


"To meet our customers' growing demands for flexible LAN-to-LAN connectivity for advanced, bandwidth-intensive real-time multimedia services, it is critical that we are able to control and configure the amount of bandwidth reserved per each site participating in the same E-LAN service. We must also be able to control the amount of bandwidth that is being allocated to that specific E-LAN in the core of the network, while delivering hard QoS and bandwidth guarantees per site and per application," said Alain Vellard, director of research and development on access networks for France Telecom.
http://www.atrica.com