The multiprotocol road to happiness: Peace, products, parallel services

Service providers stay positioned to succeed by continually looking for ways to augment product offerings. In turn, those providers pressure vendors to deliver equipment for more powerful and zesty networks, which hopefully provides unique services that competitors are not likely to have.

For some that means embracing multiple protocols. While the notion of ATM and IP co-existing is not new, service providers are increasing the pace with multiprotocol rollouts as their needs rapidly evolve.

The rationale for this equipment is obvious: Don't settle on one protocol when service providers can effectively use both to offer more services and service levels to their customers. Although a service provider may not be ready to add ATM- or IP-based services to its offerings, it can do so more easily than if the provider depended on one specific protocol.

HarvardNet's three business areas focus on DSL, Web hosting and virtual private networking and use Cisco Systems' multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)-based IP+ATM multiservice switches in its backbone to expand its service offering.

"A lot of the DSL broadband companies today are building out native ATM-only network infrastructures," said Larry Jarvis, chief technology officer for HarvardNet. Those providers take DSL from the customer premises and pass it through their network via ATM at Layer 2 before handing it to an ISP on the network's edge.

"HarvardNet made the conscious decision to build out all three of our business components to enable a whole suite of additional services to our customers," Jarvis said. Keeping profitability in mind, HarvardNet considered the type of services it expected to offer during the next three years and the infrastructure required to deploy those services.

"When you look at what [providers] are doing today, they are operating in a vertical [market] with very limited functionality-type services," Jarvis said. "If I give you IP connectivity to the Internet and you want to do voice over IP or streaming data, it's kind of a novelty; it's not business class."

As a result, customers won't pay a premium for those services. To combat this, HarvardNet turned to DSL to provide high-speed infrastructure from homes, linking that to its high-speed backbone and then passing the traffic to a corporate office, the Internet or a hosting center. By building out a Layer 2 and Layer 3 infrastructure integrated via MPLS and Cisco's equipment, HarvardNet can enable a suite of intelligent services, Jarvis said. As part of that suite, the provider can offer end-to-end quality of service and support for IP business applications.

Cisco, which prefers IP and tag switching, favors industry acceptance of IP, but with the added services ATM offers, integration of that protocol is key. That realization pushed the company to develop the IP+ATM multiservice switches.

"There is a lot of value in providing flexibility in transport options," said Rob Redford, director of marketing for Cisco. "If you look at providers without an infrastructure, they feel forced to make a choice between ATM for today or IP and services for tomorrow. Service providers are moving from being transport providers today to service providers in the future, and this equipment enables them to do both."

Conversely, vendor AccessLan is developing an IP-enabled DSL access multiplexer to give ATM-based providers an inroad to IP services. AccessLan's equipment, called the i-SLAM, will be based on MPLS and provide IP services aggregation when it is introduced later this year, said Kumar Shah, vice president of marketing for AccessLan.

Regardless of which camp providers come from, "it is really a good plan for service providers to future-proof their platforms," Shah said.

As networks evolve, multiprotocol support will become common. "It really makes sense to have devices that bridge over both worlds," said Gary Kim, president of NxGen Data Research.