Advantages of MPLS

Written by: Les Harper - Jul 4, 2009

The Advantages of MPLS

Improved uptime (from ultra-fast re-routing) – if a major connection within the MPLS network goes down, and another path exists, traffic can be re-routed down such a path in milliseconds. In other words,there can be a major circuit outage, but you wouldn’t notice anything as the network detects and works around the problem instantly.

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).

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 locations to an existing one. You don’t need additional hardware, such as expensive firewalls. All you need is standard routers.

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

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 method of achieving the same Quality of Service experiences, as the little used bandwidth can be used by other services when the services that have a higher priority aren’t using it.

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 your order and it being delivered may shrink. The time between you ordering an upgrade and it being delivered may also shrink.

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 somewhat.