Bell Business Insights newsletter

Reduce costs at the same time

By Greg Banks
Associate Director, Product Management, Bell

Are you reaping the benefits of applications such as desktop Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking? Bringing these and other cost-saving applications to the entire organization requires greater throughput, any-to-any connectivity and Quality of Service (QoS) prioritization. Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), a layer 3 (IP) networking protocol, paves the way to a converged communications landscape while lowering service, bandwidth and telephony costs.

How it works
MPLS applies labels to IP packets, enabling them to be switched rapidly within a core network without calculating the route at every switching node. Think of packets as colour-coded cars on a highway. When legacy (traditional) layer 2 technology sends a car from A to B, it builds a road from point to point and sends the car along that road. Instead of building a road for each car, MPLS labels the car, influencing its behaviour as needed to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements – for example, taking the express lane or collectors, where to exit, and so on – and sends it out on the highway. In this way blue cars know to enter the highway at Montréal and stay in the passing lane until they get off at Ottawa, whereas red cars from Québec continue on to Toronto in the slow lane.

Because packets in the same flow always follow the same path, MPLS is an ideal data transfer method for even the most latency-sensitive applications, such as voice. Legacy networks typically do not have the reach, any-to-any connectivity and full QoS that would allow enterprises to leverage all the advantages of today’s applications. As a result, MPLS-based wide area networks have been adopted by 71 per cent of North American firms with more than 500 employees.

Key benefits of MPLS

• Cost savings: The technology takes advantage of shared infrastructure and any-to-any communication to lower equipment, service and telephony costs
• Increased application performance and flexibility
• Scalability: Any-to-any communication enables the simple addition of new nodes to the network without reconfiguration

Super scalability
Until the advent of MPLS, a point-to-point communication protocol had to be set up individually between each node and every other node with which it needed to communicate, effectively forming a web-like mesh. If a new node was added to the network, all existing nodes had to be reconfigured in order to connect to the new arrival. The any-to-any characteristic of MPLS eliminates that need, facilitating rapid, at-will network expansion or contraction.

Tremendous value
One of the best things about MPLS is the high value applications that ride on top of it. Send a video presentation to every employee in the company simultaneously with multicasting or reduce telecommunications costs by combining voice, data and Internet services over a single network connection. Find out more about top MPLS applications in our article on the Top 5 uses of MPLS.

Bell can help
Bell is a leader in the field of MPLS solutions for the enterprise. To find out more about MPLS or to discover the ways in which it can benefit your organization, contact your Bell representative or click here to have a Bell representative contact you.

Greg Banks is Associate Director, Product Management with Bell.