Dedicated transatlantic fiber or EoMPLS, how can I tell???

yuhuiyao · ‎03-12-2009

We are negotiating with our ISP for a 100Mbps transatlantic connection. They said they can provide a dedicated fiber with the dropoff RJ45 FastE. Is there anyway I can tell that they are not using EoMPLS or anyother L2 technology? I just want to make sure if I ordered dedicated fiber, I get the dedicated fiber.

Joseph W. Doherty · ‎03-12-2009

Assuming there's no easy method to tell, or even if there were, why is this important? How about just getting an agreement on service, bandwidth and latency. If they guarantee it and provide it, does it matter how they accomplish it?

PS:

If there's any type of security concern based on how they provide the service, you might want to run an IPSec tunnel across the path.

yuhuiyao · ‎03-12-2009

It was about redundancy. If fiber, we can pinpoint which transatlantic fiber used and built our backup connection not on that fiber. However, if it was EoMPLS, there will be multiple ISP involved and our backup connection will have to avoid those ISPs.

Joseph W. Doherty · ‎03-12-2009

For redundancy, wouldn't you be interested in more than just the actual transatlantic fiber? I.e. the complete end-to-end path?

Hopefully, that information can be extracted from your provider (including perhaps whatever redundancy they provide within the path), but I could also see a concern where they do fail over to a backup path which now coincides with your backup (or alternate) path and you don't know you've lost your physical redundancy.

paolo bevilacqua · ‎03-12-2009

Hi, it's simply impossible that it will be a dedicated 100mbps fiber for the simple reason such a thing doesn't exist.

Transatlantic connection are in reality 10 gbps split via DWDM to multiple gigabit or stm-16 circuits.

These connections are never sold to final users but traded between major telcos only.

krishna.vv · ‎03-13-2009

Hey..some implementations of EoMPLS such as ERS will not permit customer layer 2 control protocols and they are dropped. Also the throughput will be relatively lower than on privite line circuit due to MPLS & VLAN headers.. May be some use to identify the difference.