A lack of completion

Call them the Untold Stories of the Internet protocol network. The first involves Internet telephony gateways. Ericsson announced its new Gatekeeper last week, claiming that it connects gateways, complies with H.323 and adds network intelligence and thus new services to the promise of IP telephony (see story on page 8). H.323 is the ITU-T standard that box makers are counting on to enable different public network/IP gateways to communicate with each other.

Other vendors, including Lucent, Cisco, Nortel and Bay, have already started jockeying for position in the explosive gateway equipment market. This year's $94 million market is projected to soar to $371 million in 1999, says Tempe, Ariz.-based Forward Concepts.

The Untold Story is the idea that gateways allow for clear voice communications over the Internet. Instead, carriers use the gateways to route traffic over leased lines or other transmission media that they control. That way, carriers can ensure higher-quality service, as well as guarantee that traffic travels through the two gateways rather than an unknown number of switches on the Internet.

The second Untold Story involves switched IP, which is awaiting its multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) standard (see story on page 18). The only problem is that three camps disagree about the form it should take.

One camp, described by analyst Tom Nolle as "graybeard router types," believes all future traffic should and will be connectionless. The second camp comprises advocates of asynchronous transfer mode who perceive MPLS and anything else that augments basic routing as the devil's work-Cisco qualifies as this group's horned and pitch-forked one.

The third understands that a version of MPLS that defines the extent to which a switch vendor could provision useful, differentiated features is critical to the public network's future.

These three camps should explain their differing versions of MPLS before the Internet Engineering Task Force makes the standard official. If for no other reason, their ultimate Untold Story is that, in the long run, they are really arguing about how switch-like or how router-like a new class of device will be. That device is an MPLS node, also called a label switch router, that could well replace routers and switches altogether.