Should I Be Interested in MPLS Traffic Engineering?
Earlier this year, I was asked to present an interesting MPLS-based technology – MPLS Traffic Engineering (MPLS TE) – to members of the Cisco Powered Network (CPN) program attending the yearly CPN worldwide meeting. I gladly accepted the opportunity because I wanted to find out how many service providers already use this exciting technology and how they are using it. During the presentation, I discovered a few interesting facts:
Many of the students were not familiar with the technology at all.
Several students expressed the opinion that, although MPLS TE is an interesting technology, it is not usable in their networks because "they have plenty of available bandwidth."
In this article, I demonstrate when and how you might benefit from deploying MPLS TE in your network and how you can improve your MPLS TE-related theoretical knowledge and configuration skills. In a subsequent article, I discuss how you can benefit from MPLS TE features, even if your network is currently overprovisioned.