Cable & Wireless upgrades IP network

Telco using OC-192 using multi-protocol label switching

Cable & Wireless (C&W) has upgraded its IP network to OC-192 using multi-protocol label switching (MPLS).

It is the industry's first transatlantic link of its kind and C&W hopes it will provide more reliability and capacity to customers' data traffic and allow for additional services. Analysts agreed that it would improve service quality.

Speaking exclusively to vnunet.com's sister publication Network News, Duncan Black, director of corporate networking strategy at C&W, said that business customers would get the same predictability over the MPLS-enabled multi-city links as over the public switched telephone network.

"There was concern that some carriers' IP networks were dropping packets, but we believe quality of service is the same. Now that companies are looking for an IP link to global offices, reliability and scalability in the backbone is essential," he said.

"MPLS offers more predictable performance for all traffic, ensuring very low packet delay together with virtually no packet loss and very low jitter even as the network continues to grow," he added.

Based on a core traffic engineering platform using Juniper Networks' M160 MPLS routers, C&W's global IP network could now provide switching functions at 10Gbps, Black said. This would allow it to offer IP transit, hosting, content delivery and streaming media services.

Analysts said that MPLS paved the way for better quality of service. "MPLS allows packets to be prioritised, so C&W can boast higher reliability," explained Justin Neville-Rolfe of analyst group Yankee.

He added that failure to adopt MPLS was a major reason why IP networks failed to take off.

Sonet/SDH-level OC-192 offers 10Gbps speeds over optical fibre. Designed primarily as a resilient telecoms ring, the layering of MPLS on top offers improved quality of service, which has become increasingly important if time-sensitive applications are to be supported successfully.