MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies

12.2. THE BUSINESS DRIVERS

In previous chapters in this part of the book, we have discussed L3VPN and L2VPN services, and compared and contrasted the merits of the two schemes. Both schemes require some degree of networking knowledge on the part of the customer of the service. In the L3VPN case, the customer may be required to configure a routing protocol to run between the CE and the PE, or at a minimum be required to configure a static route pointing to the PE. In the L2VPN case, the customer builds an overlay network with point-to-point connections provisioned by the service provider and needs to run a routing protocol on that overlay network. Thus the degree of expertise required of the customer is somewhat greater than in the L3VPN case. Both of these schemes may be fine for larger companies that have IT experts available to carry out the necessary designs and configurations.

However, with network-based applications becoming more prevalent in relatively small companies, there is also a need for such companies to have connectivity over the wide area. These companies might have a handful of sites and want to have connectivity between the LANs at those sites. For such companies, it is important to have an easy-to-use service as they may not have the luxury of IT experts that the larger companies have. VPLS achieves this by allowing them to interconnect their equipment over the wide area as if it were attached to the same LAN. Note that the customer plays no part in the emulation ...