New ATM, MPLS, FR group seeks a name

The MPLS and Frame Relay Alliance are currently searching for a new name to describe the combined entity resulting from the merger announced last week with the ATM Forum during a joint meeting in Salt Lake City.

The two groups had been working closely for some time already, holding their meetings together and cooperating on some tasks. Combining them will allow greater efficiency and avoid overlaps and disconnects in terms of interoperability goals, said Rick Wilder, an Alcatel engineer who also serves as the alliance’s vice president of technology.

For carriers with separate ATM, frame relay and MPLS networks, blending the two groups will help ensure smooth convergence of those technologies, Wilder said. “Interworking is a very big part of the technical program right now,” he said. “What’s needed is a common forum to make sure the right channels of communication are open across the industry so we end up with multivendor interoperable solutions for those new multiservice network architectures.”

With 105 members, the new group hopes to have at least one new specification approved in the next 12 months, as well as the requirements for interworking Ethernet, ATM and frame relay traffic over MPLS networks. The next meeting will take place in Budapest, Hungary in October.

The new group’s board of directors will be a superset of both previously existing boards. Companies that originally occupied a seat on both boards will hold one seat on the new board, so the seven-member MPLS/frame relay board and the four-member ATM board will become an eight- or nine-member board in the new group.

As a first task, coming up with a name for the group will be no small challenge. And a name must be agreed upon for the merger to be complete, which is scheduled to happen before 2005. The group is open to suggestions, Wilder said. “We want to communicate that frame relay, ATM and MPLS are all very live and useful technologies going forward, but naming them all makes the [group’s] name a little unwieldy, so it is a bit of a dilemma,” he said. “I’d hope in the next two or three months we’d have consensus on that.”