A study on Any transport over MPLS (AToM)

Recently there has been an increasing market demand to provide metropolitan and longer-reach Ethernet connectivity. According to a Yankee Group estimate, in 2001 the market for virtual private network (VPN) services over traditional (ATM and Frame Relay) transports was three times larger than IP VPN services in 2000, although the IP (including Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS]) segment is growing much faster and could eclipse traditional services before 2005. This growth, combined with the increasing need to protect existing infrastructure and provide traditional point-to-point connections of different types, has pushed service providers to look for solutions that allow them to carry Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic across a common, converged, single infrastructure without changing the existing service models. Thus Cisco has an opportunity to deliver its Layer 2 tunneling solutions to address this market requirement. Cisco Any Transport over MPLS (AToM) is one such solution that addresses the needs of providers who would like to deploy MPLS and offer services such as Layer 2 aggregation and virtual leased lines using MPLS traffic engineering and quality of service (QoS) along with Cisco AToM.