SVC Alliance Promotes ``One Hop'' Networking as Key to True Broadband.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUPERCOMM 2003

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 2003

The SVC Alliance is a cooperative telecommunications-industry marketing organization that advocates the use of "One Hop" networking principles to bring carrier-class Quality of Service (QoS), end-to-end broadband and intelligent networking to the world of IP-based networks.

Although the Internet Protocol has emerged as the lingua franca of packet-based networks for both data and voice, QoS has remained merely hit-and-miss and end-to-end broadband has remained elusive, largely relegating application and network service providers to "best effort" and commodity communications services. Through its industry awareness programs, the SVC Alliance identifies "Multi Hop" networking (the use of too many intermediate processing points) as the culprit for many of the current limitations of multi-service IP-based networking. In addition to best-effort QoS and elusive broadband, the SVC Alliance implicates Multi-Hop networking design practices as the source of many pervasive problems with security, reliability and cost-effective scalability.

One-Hop networking principles, on the other hand, are based on the use of well-established and dynamic communications standards -- such as Dynamic ATM, Dynamic Frame Relay and MPLS -- to design better IP-based voice and data networks. The service attributes (such as QoS metrics, effective broadband and measurable reliability) of IP-based networks are dictated not by IP (a so called Layer 3 protocol), but rather by the way that the underlying network "cloud" is implemented. The network cloud is where Layer 2 and 2.5 protocols are weaved together to implement voice and data IP-networking.

Until recently, the implementation of IP-based networks was based largely on dedicated point-to-point carrier services, such as expensive leased lines and Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVCs). Now, with four generations of Switched Virtual Circuit (SVC) technologies available to them, service providers of all sorts (carriers and their xSP customers) can build network solutions on dynamic communications services at Layer 2 and 2.5. The combination of SVCs (also known as Label Switching Paths, LSPs) with control and signaling protocols provides the key to migrating from Multi-Hop networking design principles to One-Hop networking. (The four-generation lineage of SVC technologies, more generally known as label switching protocols, includes X.25 SVCs, Frame Relay SVCs, ATM SVCs, and MPLS LSPs.)

The SVC Alliance, a non-profit mutual-benefit corporation, announced its debut today at SUPERCOMM in Atlanta. Membership in the Alliance is open to all vendors of carrier-class products and services as well as independent sales organizations, telecommunications consultants and systems integrators.