A router does indeed switch labels on a router faster than it routes packets.
Yes, I would imagine many people are in a situation where MPLS would make a meaningful impact on their routers. Ever upgrade a router because it ran out of nuts? Maybe you didn't need to. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adam Moffett" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2019 1:03:05 PM Subject: [AFMUG] MPLS I think I don't fully understand what the advantages are of MPLS. I mean I've been reading the white-papers and such, and I see it brings some features to the table, but when are we going to use them? Routing speed: * MPLS can make forwarding decisions faster. When they made this in the 1990's I'm sure that was a big deal, but I'm doubting whether there is really measurably better latency on modern hardware. Is there? Traffic Engineering: * It can do redundancy, but it seems to rely on the routing protocol (eg OSPF) to know which paths are up. I don't understand what that buys us. * It can do load sharing on unequal paths. Admittedly that's very hard to do with L3 routing protocols, and that would have been extremely useful at one point in time. But how often does that happen now that we're in a world of gigabit and 10gigabit connections? L2 tunneling * It can transport L2 traffic over an L3 network. It does it with less overhead (8 bytes) than any other method I can think of. I don't really see a downside to this. So are people running MPLS just to get VPLS tunnels, or do you find that the other tools in the MPLS toolbox matter in today's world? -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
-- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
