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Choosing an MPLS Service Provider |
Corporate decision makers need to do their homework so they can negotiate from a position of strength and make informed choices when choosing an MPLS provider. What follows are a few tips from the trenches.
When reviewing your options, consider virtual network operators (VNOs) like Virtela, Masergy and Megapath. Un-burdened by a legacy infrastructure, VNOs have partnered aggressively with other carriers to extend their services and support a variety of local-access technologies, says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research. Masergy, for example, recently announced what is said to be the industry's first global Ethernet wide area network (WAN) service. On the other hand, major telcos have more mature offerings and are somewhat less likely to get acquired.
When evaluating service providers, get their vital statistics, including metrics like jitter, delay and loss -- "actual, not average," advises Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research. "Get it in writing if possible." And talk to customers, particularly about reliability and performance over time.
Then ask a service provider sales rep these questions:
- What kind of backup does the service provider offer, particularly over the last mile? Byram Healthcare migrated to MCI/Verizon's MPLS service because its former MPLS provider, AT&T, could not provide ISDN backup links to all major sites, Entrup reports. "The network was always important to us, but now we need that redundancy because we have more eggs in one basket."
- How secure is the network? Can your MPLS service support secured links to VPN SSL clients over the public Internet? This is important if you want to communicate with extranet partners and support your road warriors' mobile devices.
- What kind of monitoring and tracking capabilities will the carrier provide? How easily can you request a change? A growing number of carriers provide a Web-based portal through which in-house staff can monitor traffic, issue and track trouble tickets, and input change-of-service requests.
- How quickly can you deploy bandwidth or reconfigure class of service for a given application? How granular is class of service?
- How accurate and responsive is billing? Does your monthly bill reflect changes in bandwidth and quality-of-service parameters? Can you get a consolidated bill across all your services?
Once you choose a carrier, give it traffic data so it can size your bandwidth correctly. "Carriers should do that without your asking, but they don't always," says Bob McGuire, a vice president at iWave. "A company that's not IT-savvy can wind up buying something that makes sense on paper but is overkill."
And finally, "Moving off MPLS is tougher than getting off frame relay, because it supports more applications," says Forrester's Pierce. "So treat it as a long-term bet. You're buying a package: Take a good look at it before you commit."
--E.H.
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The Truth Behind the Cost
When it comes to infrastructure, cost is king. A growing number of midmarket companies are adopting MPLS as a cost-efficient way to increase bandwidth, particularly at smaller sites. Midmarket companies are especially vulnerable to out-of-control telecom costs for remote sites, says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, a New York-based firm that specializes in analyzing emerging technologies. "They're not big enough to negotiate [major rate breaks] with a carrier, but they still need a lot of bandwidth," she says.
Going from frame relay to MPLS enables a company to double its bandwidth network-wide while paying only about 10% more overall, Pierce says. One of Forrester's enterprise clients expects to save about 40% in telecom charges by moving from frame relay to an MPLS data network, she adds.
In the past year, network systems integrator iWave has helped approximately 20 midmarket companies migrate to MPLS. Many clients see cost savings across the network, or at least in areas where leased lines are pricey, says Bob McGuire, a managing partner at the New York-based company. Even if the move is cost-neutral, the improvements make it worthwhile, he adds. "They get a real private network, higher port speeds, higher bandwidth, better management."
But industry sources warn that corporate decision makers should by no means assume that MPLS is a good move for their organization. "Sometimes MPLS can be overkill" in terms of a firm's networking needs, McGuire says. He recommends an in-depth, circuit-by-circuit cost analysis -- old versus new -- to calculate what, if any, savings there will be. The salient expense items include leased routers at every site, local-access charges, port charges for carrier links (which vary according to a site's bandwidth needs), plus monthly charges for class of service and bandwidth management.
Then there are the human costs of designing and installing an MPLS network that meets your particular needs and continues to meet them over time. "These are not easy installations," McGuire warns. "I've been on multiple projects that lasted 10-plus weeks. You're building your own network with your own special design instead of just using the public network."
Figuring out class of service and bandwidth prioritization can be complex, not to mention politically sensitive (which application or user group comes first and which gets bumped during a traffic jam?). "All that has to be implemented, then tested, to make sure it works; then you have to build backup," says McGuire. "The schematics are fairly complex. You have to ask, 'Is it worth doing?'"
"When you're doing a full-mesh network [with every site needing to talk to every other site], you begin to see a price distinction between frame relay and MPLS, particularly when the number of PVCs [private virtual circuits] gets larger than the total number of sites," says Manish Malhotra, AT&T's director of virtual private network services.
Conversely, companies with a hub-and-spoke network configuration -- remote sites linked to a data center, for example -- are unlikely to realize significant cost savings moving from frame relay to MPLS, Verizon and AT&T spokespeople agree. As O'Neal Steel illustrates, however, companies may still want to use MPLS' class of service to ensure adequate response time for business-critical remote applications.
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