Riverstone Garners HGC Metro MPLS Deal

By Paula Bernier

Riverstone Networks Inc. won what it says is the industry's first major contract for metro-based multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). The vendor will supply several million dollars worth of its routers to Hong Kong-based Hutchison Global Crossing (HGC) over several quarters, according to Tim Wu, technical marketing director.

Specifically, the deal includes Riverstone's RS 38000 routers in the metro core, RS 8600 multi-service metro routers for point-of-presence (PoP) aggregation and RS 3000 metro access routers for in-building access applications.

The routers initially will be added to HGC's optical Ethernet network to offer video-on-demand to about 1 million Hong Kong households, Wu says.

Application employs the bandwidth reservation feature of MPLS, he says. In the future, HGC expects to offer VPNs to businesses based on MPLS.

HGC use of MPLS in the metro part of its network, particularly for a residential video application, is unique. Most carriers adopting MPLS use it for backbone network traffic engineering and, in some cases, to create private, secure links across IP networks.

For example, WorldCom Inc. uses MPLS for traffic engineering in the core of its UUNet public Internet backbone and on its VBNS (Very High Performance Backbone Network Service; and in its edge switches and routers to offer Private IP services over the company's private IP network.

Teleglobe Inc. also uses MPLS for traffic engineering.

Ardent Communica-tions Inc. (formerly CAIS Internet), meanwhile, has implemented MPLS across all of its core and edge routers. The company in early July was using MPLS in limited test environments for traffic engineering, VPN services and some small tunneling for performance and hop count reduction.

Meanwhile, AT&T is using MPLS to IP-enable its frame relay services.

"MPLS is going to be a long, slow roll-out moving from the core to the edge," says Kevin Mitchell, directing analyst of service provider networks for Infonetics Research Inc.