6 June 2002 -- At SuperComm 2002 in Atlanta, GA, USA the MPLS Forum - the international industry organisation for worldwide deployment of Multiprotocol Label Switching networks, applications, and services - hosted what it claims was the largest-ever public demonstration of multi-vendor MPLS interoperability.
"Twenty-one vendors have connected more than USD20m of networking equipment," said Ananda Sen Gupta, chair of the Interoperability Working Group and vp of marketing. "Our goal is to show the carrier community that MPLS can now be deployed effectively in a network as a core technology."
Service interoperability testing was conducted for technologies including:
- RSVP-Traffic Engineering, over a core network which used equipment from Alcatel, Avici Systems, Charlotte's Web Networks, Ericsson, Foundry Networks, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lucent Technologies, Mahi Networks, Marconi, Riverstone Networks and Tenor Networks;
- Layer 3 BGP/MPLS VPN with PE functionality (as specified by RFC 2547bis), with participants Agilent Technologies, Celox Networks, Charlotte's Web Networks, Juniper Networks, Laurel Networks, NetTest, Spirent Communications, and Unisphere Networks;
- Ethernet-over-MPLS with PE functionality (as addressed by the "Martini draft"), with participants Agilent, Charlotte's Web Networks, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, Ixia, Juniper, Laurel, Riverstone, and Vivace Networks.
(For white paper, see www.mplsforum.org/Supercomm.htm)