Tellabs Inspire Magazine: Help Needed

article reprint — TELLABS INSPIRE june 2008

Help Wanted Needed As service providers migrate to IP/MPLS, they don’t have to go it alone. By Joan Engebretson

When a service provider decides to migrate traffic to IP/MPLS, selecting the appropriate equipment is just one of the choices that must be made. Equally crucial to the process: Picking the right partner to help with the implementation process. The pool of telecom professionals with experience in implementing carrier-grade IP/MPLS solutions is limited. That’s one major reason why operators often find that it’s easier and more effective to tap into an infrastructure vendor’s embedded expertise than to hire or develop that expertise in-house. Tellabs® Global Services has this expertise and has helped some of the largest network operators in the world transition from legacy technologies, such as ATM, to IP/MPLS. The clients are diverse: wireless carriers seeking to use IP/MPLS for mobile backhaul, incumbent landline operators wanting to move Frame Relay and ATM traffic to a more cost-effective backbone, cable companies seeking to offer Layer 2 VPN services and competitive service providers looking to offer Layer 3 VPNs.

“People choose us for our strengths at the core,” said Raianne Reiss, Tellabs senior manager of global services marketing and strategy. With Tellabs’ strong track record of developing carriergrade solutions, she added, “we’re going to send you a service provider network expert.”

Many Operators, Many Reasons The value Tellabs brings to an operator includes insights into best practices for solving key issues, Reiss said. In addition, Tellabs Global Services has deep knowledge of other manufacturers’ core and edge network products, which is essential to ensuring optimal deployment architectures and delivering smooth rollouts, said Leo Lee, Tellabs senior consultant. One example is a competitive carrier that is using the Tellabs® 8800 Multiservice Router (MSR) Series to deliver Layer 3 VPNs which can economically support a wide range of services. The company chose Tellabs partly because of Tellabs strong QoS offerings and proven interoperability with third-party router devices. Tellabs Global Services has assisted by testing

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article reprint — help wanted needed

Layer 3 functionality such as BGP dampening, LDP graceful restart, and by keeping up with technologies defined in new requests for comments from the International Engineering Consortium. Wireless carriers, meanwhile, are focused on moving what is now mostly TDM and ATM backhaul traffic to an IP/MPLS solution. The technical staff at a wireless carrier typically understands ATM but isn’t as familiar with Ethernet as a transport medium. Such an operator might look to Tellabs for help in how to implement QoS over Ethernet — and many have done just that. For more than a year, Tellabs’ Global Services has had a team of people engaged with two wireless carriers that have deployed the Tellabs 8800 MSR series. Tellabs team members — including senior consultants, program managers and planning, engineering and operations personnel — are on site every day at the carriers’ facilities. These individuals have been involved in creating an engineering design package that includes a comprehensive and detailed view of all physical and logical connections/topology, providing key insights into the architecture and design criteria necessary to guarantee end-to-end QoS. Here, too, knowledge of other manufacturers’ equipment — in this case, legacy ATM equipment — was critical. “We needed to know how the previous services were architected so we could maintain ATM functionality across the core and keep service level agreements,” Lee said. “The client had stringent bandwidth requirements they had to accommodate and needed to maintain failover mechanisms that work within the span of milliseconds. They needed someone who could architect a network to meet these SLAs.”

Asia Pacific

Tellabs One Tellabs Center 1415 West Diehl Road Naperville, IL 60563 U.S.A. +1 630 798 8800 Fax: +1 630 798 2000

Tellabs 3 Anson Road #14–01 Springleaf Tower Singapore 079909 Republic of Singapore +65 6215 6411 Fax: +65 6215 6422

— Leo Lee, Tellabs senior consultant

Works Well With Others Although some Tellabs IP/MPLS consulting services engagements are with operators deploying the Tellabs 8800 MSR series, Lee said that the company is well-positioned to offer IP/MPLS migration consulting services even when Tellabs equipment isn’t involved.

“People don’t always think of Tellabs for projects involving other manufacturers’ equipment, but our consulting team is just as effective when equipment from other vendors is being deployed,” Lee said. “We have a staff of engineers who are capable of configuring myriad network devices.” Tellabs delivered services for several network operators on IP/MPLS network architecture before the customers even selected a platform, Reiss said. “In several other cases, we provided consulting on IP/MPLS business case development: helping the customer figure out where, when and what services to launch, and the necessary architecture to support them in order to deliver a go-to-market business case/ return on investment analysis,” Reiss said. Reiss encourages network operators to consider Tellabs consulting services for virtually any aspect of their IP/MPLS migration plans. “We’ve demonstrated that we can assist any type of network operator to plan and execute a smooth IP/MPLS migration path that meets their organizational objectives from the start and on an ongoing basis,” she said.

MPLS Multiprotocol Label Switching QoS Quality of Service SLA Service Level Agreement VPN Virtual Private Network

Acronym ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode BGP Border Gateway Protocol IEC International Engineering Consortium LDP Label Distribution Protocol

North America

“The client had stringent bandwidth requirements. They needed someone who could architect a network to meet these SLAs.”

Europe, Middle East & Africa

Latin America & Caribbean

Tellabs Abbey Place 24–28 Easton Street High Wycombe, Bucks HP11 1NT United Kingdom +44 870 238 4700 Fax: +44 870 238 4851

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Statements herein may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events, products, features, technology and resulting commercial or technological benefits and advantages. These statements are for discussion purposes only, are subject to change and are not to be construed as instructions, product specifications, guarantees or warranties. Actual results may differ materially. The following trademarks and service marks are owned by Tellabs Operations, Inc., or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries: TELLABS®, TELLABS and T symbol®, and T symbol®. Any other company or product names may be trademarks of their respective companies. © 2008 Tellabs. All rights reserved. 74.1973E – REV A – 6/2008