NEW WAN ORDER

摘要

Frame relay as a circuit-oriented topology has been immensely success-ful-in the recent commodity wars, it even earned some WAN managers hero status for reducing monthly recurring connectivity costs. But Multiprotocol Label Switching is making incursions on frame's market territory-Meta Group forecasts that IP-based WANs will surpass conventional services like frame by 2007-and we finally decided that providers' comprehensive MPLS services were mature enough to put to the test. We first dedicated space to MPLS in July 2000 (see "MPLS: A New Traffic Cop for Your WAN," at www. nwc.com/1113/1113ws2.html). This time out, we wanted to determine whether MPLS is truly ready to replace an aging frame WAN. Now, some WAN managers mistakenly think of MPLS as a one-to-one replacement for frame, expecting a continued downward trend on prices. But we found that enterprises won't automatically see lower recurring monthly prices with MPLS replacement networks. Rather, the additional services that MPLS can integrate into a single network—such as voice, video and Internet—provide the true ROI by making WAN management more efficient.