Infonetics Research: Service Providers' Preference of Transport Protocols for Packet Oriented Networks

Infonetics Research conducted a survey to find out if service providers plan to use PSS-TE or MPLS-TP, both or any other alternate transport protocol for building their packet-oriented networks.

 

Infonetics released the report titled MPLS-TP and PBB-TE Go Toe-to-Toe: Service Provider Survey.

 

Principal Analyst at Infonetics Research, Michael Howard (News - Alert) explained that, “PBB-TE shows it has some market challenges on two counts when compared to MPLS-TP. First, 32% of the service providers we interviewed will not consider, or have considered and rejected, deployment of PBB-TE, while only 5% express similar negatives for MPLS-TP.”

 

Howard continued: “Second, even though MPLS-TP is not yet defined, almost 80% of the service providers said they are considering MPLS-TP, while 53% will consider PBB-TE. If MPLS-TP were defined today, we would expect MPLS-TP to be the winner between these two protocols, yet there is a strong enough interest in PBB-TE that it has a reasonable chance of being around for the long term.”

 

The survey was part of an Infonetics’ Continuous Research Service. It enquired service providers about their plans for MPLS-TP, PBB-TE, stacked VLAN, PBB, VPWS (Pseudowire or PWE3), VPLS using Label Distribution Protocol signaling, and VPLS using Border Gateway (News - Alert) Protocol signaling. The report includes all details and the responses given by service providers regarding each type of packet transport protocol.

 

Purchase decision makers, such as incumbent operators, who are vertically integrated, operating by wireline as well as wireless businesses were interviewed. The study also included competitive providers in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), Asia Pacific and North America.

 

Service providers are expected to own and operate a packet transport network already or will by 2010. The cumulative revenue of service providers who responded to the interview was $345 billion for 2008. About $53 billion was spent on capital expenditures this year, according to the report.

 

The Infonetics report also throws light on packet transport issues and characteristics, which packet transport protocols have been deployed and which will and will not be considered. Information regarding which protocols will be employed in various telecom equipment like carrier Ethernet switches, routers, optical equipment is available in the report. The importance of interworking between Layer 2 and Layer 3 for end-to-end transport tunnels, the opinion of carriers regarding this and manufacturer recommendations are included in the report.

 

The report highlights can be accessed on Infonetics’ Website. Infonetics Research (News - Alert) is an international market research and consulting company which caters to the communications industry. The firm defines and tracks emerging and established technologies throughout the world and it helps organizations plan, strategize and compete effectively.