BUSINESS WIRE

October 09, 2003 ; McLean, Virginia

Isocore today announced that a live production VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Services) network will be serving the conference and exhibits attendees with wireless access to Internet during the MPLS 2003 International Conference to be held October 26-28 in Washington, DC. This first demonstration is supported by major vendors of VPLS equipment, Alcatel (ALA), Cisco Systems (CSCO), and Extreme Networks (EXTR).

VPLS enables the connection of multiple sites over a simulated Ethernet broadcast domain across a provider provisioned IP/MPLS network. All Customer Edge (CE) devices participating in one VPLS instance appear to be on the same LAN and therefore can communicate directly with one another in a multipoint topology without requiring a full mesh of point-to-point circuits. In a VPLS network, CE devices and Provider Edge (PE) devices are not routing peers, which means there is no need for Service Providers to provision customer IP routes. Furthermore, as compared to traditional LAN switching technologies, VPLS is more flexible in its geographic scaling so that CE sites may be within the same Metropolitan area, or may be geographically dispersed.

Conference attendees will personally become part of a VPLS instance and experience applications such as Internet access, video streaming, and access to conference proceedings as well as recorded sessions over a VPLS network supporting multiple classes of service. MPLS 2003 attendees will access these services by their laptop computers that are connected to PE routers via wireless access points. The network will include Alcatel 7750, Cisco 7600 Series routers and Extreme Black Diamond as the VPLS-enabled PE routers. The PE devices at the conference site will be peering with the Masergy's hub in Washington DC, as well as PE devices at Isocore Internetworking Laboratory in McLean VA, making this a true service provider provisioned VPLS network interconnecting devices at geographically separated sites.

More information about the live demonstration and MPLS 2003 conference visit http://www.mpls2003.com.

Contact: Vincent Dean; (703) 556-4939 or vdean@isocore.com