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Point to Point vs. MPLS

Scott Hanson
Level 3
Level 3

                   Hello,

Company currently is on a Tier 1 ISPs MPLS service for 40+ site nationwide.  Looking to cut cost and keep the performance the same or better.   All servers are co-located in a data center.  Can anyone give me some feedback on the pros and cons of going to point to point connections with all remote sites connected to the central site vs. being on an MPLS?

Thanks in advance!.. Replies rated.

6 Replies 6

paolo bevilacqua
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

Point to point would be more expensive than MPLS.

For cost saving you could evaluate VPN.

vmiller
Level 7
Level 7

if you in house all the layer 1 & 2 Wan stuff, its all on your staff to keep it running, never mind the additonal hardware.

I'd stay on MPLS unless the provider is not living up to SLA's

Thank you both.  We need QoS so we have to stay away from VPN over the public Internet.  I guess I will look for cheaper pricing on MPLS.

Hello Scott

One of pros for MPLS is also that if you need communicate between sites, traffic is routed directly between sites, no need to traverse HUB (data center) as it would be case if you have only p-2-p links to Data Center.

Best Regards

Please rate all helpful posts and close solved questions

Best Regards Please rate all helpful posts and close solved questions

Bilal Nawaz
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Hello,
I have a different experience having the best of both worlds. In the UK (with BT) it actually is more cost effective to have a short hall data circuit (dedicated fiber) connection than MPLS. But this is within 35KM of the parameter. Anything outside 35KM will be better off using an MPLS service in which case it works out slightly cheaper.

Normally they live up to SLA's for classes traffic like Voice, so in that aspect it's all good, but you don't actually have any control on what is going on out there in the MPLS environment.
When you have a point to point link, you have absolute control.
(Well to a certain extent, until someone does some deep digging in the road or one of the POPs) Ha!

Hope this helps

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Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

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Usually p2p is more expensive than cloud services like MPLS (FR or ATM).

With p2p, you can usually implement the "best" QoS, as you're not dependent on what the cloud vendor supports/provides.

As Paolo noted, the least expensive bandwidth is usually obtainable using the Internet.  On the issue of QoS and Internet, although the Internet itself doesn't guarantee bandwidth or support QoS, I've found if you carefully manage your ingress bandwidth, and use QoS on your egress (much as you might do for FR or ATM) you often will obtain performance similar to other WAN clouds technologies, even MPLS.

When it comes to VPN across the Internet, the key technique is avoiding oversubscription, nor sharing a VPN Internet port with "regular" Internet traffic.  For example, if two sites have a dedicated Internet T1 you can treat it like a private p2p and it generally will provide similar performance.

For hub-and-spoke, you hub should have a aggregate bandwidth that can absorb all spoke bandwidths without oversubscription.  The hub will need to shape for each spoke's bandwidth.  Doing this, again performance is much like individual p2p links.

If you need spoke-to-spoke traffic, you can, but its very difficult to manage bandwidths sharing the same Internet port (as Internet bandwidth is often so much less expensive, another Internet port might be an option).