Internet interoperability in doubt as ITU & IETF split over MPLS standards

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 01 March 2011 16:04

Business IT - Networking

The Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have decided to go their separate ways in the development of standards for multiprotocol label switching (MPLS): a move that the IETF warns could jeopardise the future interoperability of the Internet.

The IETF has announced plans to continue "to gather transport requirements and work to extend IETF MPLS forwarding, operations administration and maintenance (OAM), survivability, network management, and control plane protocols."

This announcement comes on the heels of a decision taken at the ITU on 25 February to move ahead with parallel technology development for OAM in MPLS transport networks.

According to IETF, "This step, over time, will affect the flow of Internet traffic, as separate standards will lead to products that are not able to interoperate." It described the split between the two organisations, which have a long history of technical collaboration, as being "without precedent."

Russ Housley, IETF chair, said; "The Internet we know today could not have come about without open, interoperable, global standards. I am surprised and disappointed by the action taken by the ITU. Collaboration on MPLS transport profile specifications have taken longer than expected, but the result is quality specifications, and many vendors are implementing them."

Lynn St Amour, president and CEO of the Internet Society, added: "This action takes us away from the path of global interoperability. It will have a detrimental effect on the long term health of the Internet, and reduce the benefits to all of us as users.

In what it said was "a big step towards leveraging existing MPLS deployment in transport networks," the ITU said it had agreed first stage approval of a key new standard that would "give network operators the tools necessary to manage large scale deployments of MPLS-based networks."

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