How to tell if MPLS is relevant to your business:

MPLS is probably IRRELEVANT if…
- You only have one office, with no ‘back up’ data connection
- Your only use your connections for one type of traffic (e.g. web surfing, with no site-to-site connectivity, no VoIP phone calls)
- Your main offices are connected solely via contended ADSL



MPLS is probably RELEVANT if any of the following hold true …
- You have (or plan to have) three or more offices networked together
- You have one or more VPNs, or plan to have
- You use VoIP (Voice over IP), or plan to have
- WAN/Internet Access/Telephony downtime would cost you a lot of money in terms of lost employee productivity
- You already pay for a few dedicated connections such as leased lines for internet access, ISDN trunks for your phone calls, site-to-site connections to link your offices together.

The benefits of MPLS

Improved uptime (from ultra-fast re-routing) – if a major link within the MPLS network goes down, and an alternative path exists, traffic can be re-routed down such a path in under 50 milliseconds. In other words, there can be a major outage, but you wouldn’t notice a thing as the network detects and works around the problem, in one sixth of the time it takes to blink an eye.

Cost-effective, scalable IP VPNs – forget complex meshes of tunnels between your various sites. MPLS IP VPNs make it far simpler to set up a scalable VPN, and to add new sites to an existing one. You don’t need additional hardware, such as expensive firewalls. All you need are standard routers.

Improved experience from your VPN (thanks to different Classes of Service being applied to customer-defined prioritised classes of VPN Traffic) – instead of all traffic being treated as being of equal priority, the appropriate Quality of Service settings can be applied to traffic within your WAN, so that time-sensitive traffic is assigned priority over delay tolerant traffic. For example, if the inbound traffic to your head office from your remote sites maxes out your Head Office’s connection, the traffic from your sites is prioritised in accordance to your wishes (e.g. phone calls might be prioritised above application traffic to a key server, which might be prioritised above web traffic, which might be prioritised above email).

Greater bandwidth utilisation within the WAN – the traditional way of ensuring Quality of Service within the WAN is to create virtual circuits dedicated solely to particular streams of delay-sensitive traffic (such as phone calls and site-to-site connectivity). This works, but is not ideal, as the circuits are underutilised for most of the time. MPLS allows prioritised Classes of Service. This is a far better way of achieving the same Quality of Service experiences, as the underutilised bandwidth can be used by other services when the services that have a higher priority don’t need it.

Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) allows multiple sites to be joined together as though they were on the same LAN – your Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds offices can be as easy to connect into your LAN in your London office as the three PCs in the next room.

Quicker & easier service provisioning and upgrades – with MPLS there’s no need to manually set up routing at every hop through the core network. The upshot is that the lead time between you placing an order and it being delivered may reduce. The time between you ordering an upgrade and it being delivered may also reduce.

Less network congestion – congestion can mean that the shortest path between two points may not be the best one for data to be sent along. MPLS offers sophisticated Traffic Engineering options that enable traffic to be sent along atypical paths, bypassing congested areas of the network. This re-routing also relieves the congestion significantly.