France Telecom (NYSE:FTE), one of the world's leading telecommunication carriers, and Atrica(TM), the Carrier Ethernet Company(TM), today announced the successful development and implementation of a new age of Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) with their revolutionary Virtual Private LAN Service with Traffic Engineering (VPLS-TE) capability. Jointly-developed by France Telecom and Atrica, this important industry advancement adds carrier-class traffic engineering attributes to standard VPLS capabilities to deliver carrier-class, traffic engineered E-LAN services with hard Service Level Agreements (SLAs) per application. A powerful solution for multi-site any-to-any connectivity, the new VPLS-TE based E-LAN services enable service providers to set and tune any specific bandwidth per each end user site per application, while utilizing guaranteed pre-provisioned -- yet flexibly controlled -- core bandwidth resources. France Telecom and Atrica converged on this technical solution, the industry's first VPLS-TE capability. Based on a co-developed algorithm, VPLS-TE will enable France Telecom to guarantee to its clients performance-based solutions for LAN-to-LAN connectivity. This advancement will furthermore allow carriers to develop, market, and support new revenue-generating E-LAN service models to meet their customers' growing demands for flexible LAN-to-LAN connectivity for real-time multimedia services such as voice and video applications.
The standard VPLS-based solutions defined by the IETF are best effort services that don't allow carriers to guarantee SLAs or Quality of Service (QoS). These VPNs specify only full mesh, any-to-any connectivity, offering little to no flexibility in connectivity models. In contrast, Atrica's bandwidth-conditioned VPLS-TE delivers guaranteed SLAs and hard QoS with sub-50ms service protection and is user-configurable, based on different traffic patterns. This flexible connectivity model allows a carrier to define how much bandwidth they want to reserve for the core, and how much should be reserved for specific VPNs, which can significantly improve bandwidth optimization and support their own unique revenue models.
The bandwidth-guaranteed, flexible VPLS-TE service offered by the jointly developed VPLS-TE capability incorporates ingress and egress policing at every point and direction, operator-configurable ingress and egress bandwidth per site per application, and operator-configurable core bandwidth. Its broadcast policing capability allows carriers to control broadcast traffic, further optimizing the performance of the network.
"To meet our customers' growing demands for flexible LAN-to-LAN connectivity for advanced, bandwidth-intensive real-time multimedia services, it is critical that we are able to control and configure the amount of bandwidth reserved per each site participating in the same E-LAN service. We must also be able to control the amount of bandwidth that is being allocated to that specific E-LAN in the core of the network, while delivering hard QoS and bandwidth guarantees per site and per application," said Alain Vellard, director of research and development on access networks for France Telecom.
"Our new VPLS-TE capability continues Atrica's tradition of 'pushing the technology envelope' for Carrier Ethernet technology," said Nan Chen, vice president of marketing for Atrica. "We recognized the value that adding carrier-class traffic engineering attributes to standard VPLS capabilities would bring to carriers and service providers as they strive to deliver new real-time voice and video multimedia services."
