Which WAN technolgy is dominant?

I wonder what WAN technology is currently dominant in the market, e.g. Frame Relay, MPLS, ISDN, X.25, PPP and etc? The last place I worked, they were using MPLS, which is awesome.Also, what WAN speeds are becoming common? Is T1 obsolete now?

All in all, I just want to open a discussion on WAN technologies/speeds.

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Comments

dynamik

I have limited exposure to this area, but I see many companies using or moving to MPLS. Also, many still use T1s. It may not scale well for things like streaming media, but most businesses just need to send small emails or perform small transactions, so it is more than enough for the places that really lock down network activities to business needs.

stlsmoore

In the environment I work in we host T1's we do however provide a few Frame Relay and MPLS solutions for customers. I'll be honest, my WAN knowledge is lacking but I believe MPLS is what a lot of people are moving towards and we'll see a lot of it in the future.

Kaminsky

MPLS took over from ATM which in turn, took over from Frame Relay... (according to my studies anyway) DC I work as comms manager in, I find a lot of site to site backbone links are MPLS but customer WAN circuits are still resiliant point to point fibre/copper based circuits ranging from 30gb to 64k (E1). What surprises me is that, in the UK at least, the yearly carrier rental on a 64k Kilostream is almost the same as 100mb point to point fibre link. I even have one Kilostream that is 960k and costs probably around £50k.. staggering!

Newer circuits coming in are travelling as Ethernet across the carrier and there is talk that the future may see carriers renting VLANs, as opposed to virtual circuits, that you use for your links and you conect your sites into that carrier VLAN in the same way you would string DLCIs ogether.

networker050184

Most of the circuits we provide are NxT1 and starting to sell more and more Metro-E. MPLS, as others said, is where its at these days. All of our Frame and ATM crap is being groomed over.

Pash

Spent much time recently co-coordinating with one of our financial vendors to move over to a MPLS circuit, done this 10 times over the last 2 years for different customers. So as others have said above, MPLS is where it is at.

ColbyG

Most of our WAN circuits are T1s, DS3s, and OC-XXs, with some Metro-E thrown in for MAN sites.. Our WAN is all MPLS VPNs.

EmpoweredBizTech

I continue to actively see and sell T-1 what I am not finding is a lone t-1 typically and more so lately customer are opting for Bonded T-1 (Multiple T-1's Joined Together) for the increase in bandwidth as A) metro ethernet is not available in their building, 2) they don't want to spend the about $2K a month for a 10 meg ethernet pipe. I am still see some DS3 but for the price I would choose metro over DS3

Forsaken_GA

All of my links are 10gig fiber point to points, with a couple gige copper point to points thrown in for transit customers and peers

Edit: However, we only have one facility, and our core router gear is located at a carrier hotel, so that's where we pick up all of our crossconnects. Our facility is located about 20 miles from the hotel, and we leased some dark fiber, and run that from the hotel back to our facility over DWDM gear. If we ever picked up a second facility in the same area, I'm sure we'd just grab some more fiber, but if we ever expanded out of the range to make that impractical, we'd definetly be picking up an MPLS circuit.

disi

Stupid question, is MPLS = WAN accelerator?

We have a Bluecoat WAN Accelerator between us in UK and the guys in Kaunas, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany. As described it compresses the packages and sends them in higher frequency?

I am not into our WAN/VPN connections, but could check that out

binarysoul

What surprises me that the ccna exam mentions nothing about MPLS! Isn't that an irony?

But there is another cisco$ exam:

http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/current_exams/642-611.html

Bl8ckr0uter

binarysoul wrote: »

What surprises me that the ccna exam mentions nothing about MPLS! Isn't that an irony?

But there is another cisco$ exam:

642-611 MPLS - IT Certification and Career Paths - Cisco Systems

Thats more of an ISCW thing. There is a chapter or 2 on it in the ISCW book. Of I wonder which exam it will be on for the new NP (probably route).

Maybe there will be no mention of it since there is a whole test on it for CCIP.

networker050184

MPLS isn't something you need to know about to get an MPLS circuit. It doesn't make a difference to the customer whether its MPLS or not which is probably why its not covered in any depth in the CCNA or CCNP.

networker050184

disi wrote: »

Stupid question, is MPLS = WAN accelerator?

We have a Bluecoat WAN Accelerator between us in UK and the guys in Kaunas, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany. As described it compresses the packages and sends them in higher frequency?

I am not into our WAN/VPN connections, but could check that out

Nope not at all. MPLS is just a L2 (or so) technology used in the service provider backbone. When people talk about WAN MPLS service they are talking about an MPLS VPN which allows your prefixes to stay separate in the providers routing table.