Key Factors To Consider When Selecting Your MPLS Provider

Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), once the sole domain of major corporations and telecom carriers, has gone mainstream and enterprises are increasingly developing strategies to migrate to MPLS-based WAN services. The growing need for companies to reduce costs, increase productivity, support more applications, and ramp up security is driving today's shift to MPLS.

MPLS enables companies to converge voice, video and data on a single network while its any-to-any topology offers network managers the flexibility to divert traffic around link failures and network congestion on the fly. MPLS traffic engineering and precise traffic routing allows.

KEY PROVIDER CONSIDERATIONS

I. Class of Service

Class of Service (CoS) is a way of managing network traffic by grouping similar traffic types together, such as voice, video, email or file transfers, and then assigning a priority level, or class, to each file type. CoS allows network managers to consolidate and prioritize all traffic types on a single network without sacrificing Quality of Service.

Because MPLS supports predictable application performance, providers can guarantee that traffic will meet specified service levels, however not all carriers guarantee service the same way and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) vary greatly among providers. Among the major carriers for instance, jitter guarantees range from 1ms to 10ms to no guarantee at all.

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