Share information with colleagues – not the world

BT has introduced BT Intelligent VPN, a new service on the existing MPLS network. New customers should visit the iVPN pages.

A secure, high-speed network is crucial to sharing information throughout your organisation. With BT MPLS you can expect to gain a vastly improved level of service across your data sharing network. The cost-effective solution enables you to reliably transmit information across multiple, yet unified, sites. Fast and secure voice, assured data applications, email and intranet will all be available to you.

BT MPLS is a private internet protocol (IP) virtual private network (VPN) that enables you to efficiently transfer data applications across a single secure network. BT MPLS can help you:

• Accelerate the information sharing process – helping to improve the ability of your employees to work to their full capacity.
• Decrease the administrative burden of managing multiple networks by simplifying your communications infrastructure.
• Reduce your network management overheads with BT’s range of management options, which include the supply and management of customer premise equipment (CPE).
• Ensure that you and your clients have complete confidence that vital, private information, will remain just that through our secure and reliable service, backed by industry-leading, comprehensive service level agreements.
• Support your applications that cross geographic and organisation boundaries in the form of intranets, extranets and community of interest networks (COINs).
  

BT MPLS helps you to compete in your market by supporting applications that cross geographic and company boundaries. You can also optimise the performance of those applications by using the Application Optimisation Service (AOS) of Application Assured Infrastructure (AAI) together with your BT MPLS service

BT MPLS can help you:

• Ensure critical data gets the highest priority on your network with our intelligent prioritisation feature.
• Become a more flexible organisation via the easy deployment of new applications on your network to support changing business needs. In combination with the AOS of AAI you can get extra visibility and control on all these business applications.
• Ensure that as your organisation grows or you add or move locations, you can adapt quickly and easily through rapid configuration and provisioning.
• Tailor and enhance your global network to suit varying application requirements via BT's broad portfolio of IP and networking services.
• Prioritise traffic into different application classes, ensuring that more critical applications receive priority over less time-sensitive components.
• Minimise disruption to your organisation through the retention of  your existing IP address scheme.
• Ensure that your data and your network are protected from outside intrusion through BT MPLS' ability to isolate packets.
• Receive industry-leading, comprehensive network traffic monitoring and proactive management.

BT MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) is a high speed private IP VPN that is run over a Cisco powered network. It provides you with a combination of the flexible any-to-any communication found on PSTN or the internet with the reliability, quality and security delivered via private line services.

BT MPLS can enable you to differentiate your businesses by improving your performance levels and prioritisation of traffic, as well as voice and multimedia applications – all on a single network. A range of management options are available including supply and management of customer premise equipment (CPE), helping to provide a fully managed solution. Alternatively, unmanaged options are available to provide you with the flexibility to manage your own CPE.

You can also take advantage of the following features:

• Multiple application Classes of Service backed by service level agreements.
• Choice of Cisco CPE fully managed by BT.
• Application prioritisation.
• Flexible access options.
• Leased line access up to T3/E3 for Class 1, 2 and 3.
• MobileXpress, our remote access service, which is available in over 160 countries.
• Industry leading service level agreeements for each Class of Service.
• Proactive monitoring of your network.
• 24/7 management options including all CPE and a unique automated global router confirmation tool.

The addition of our AOS, which is part of AAI, ensures your network becomes “application aware”. This optimises the performance of the applications running over it.

We're striving for our high-speed, fully secure IP VPN platform to set the standard for others to follow. Our BT MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) service over a Cisco powered network offers you the following main advantages:

• High-performance packet switching along pre-determined paths.
• Independence of the underlying open systems interconnection (OSI) layer 2 connectivity.
• High scalability enabling rapid network expansion.
• Segregation of client VPN traffic from others by the use of unique route distinguishers.
• Retention of your existing IP address scheme.

BT MPLS technology combines with Differential Services (DiffServ) and traffic engineering techniques to provide Quality of Service. It does so through the use of Priority Queuing Class Base Weighted Fair Queuing, Committed Access Rate, Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED), Frame Relay and ATM traffic shaping. This combination of MPLS and traffic engineering enables BT MPLS to differentiate between time critical, high priority traffic and delay tolerant, low priority traffic. You can classify and prioritise your applications into different Classes of Service, matching network performance with business need. MPLS offers a similar level of in-built security to existing Frame Relay and ATM networks.

More mechanisms to manage the performance of all applications on your network are available when you combine BT MPLS with the Application Optimisation Service (AOS) of Application Assured Infrastructure (AAI). With AOS the performance objectives of each individual application can be set. The service dynamically assigns network resources to each application to ensure that your performance objectives are met.

6 Class of Service (CoS) model

BT MPLS' 6 Class of Service (CoS) model sets us apart in the global market. It is a world leading Class of Service proposition and addresses the growing trend of multiple application use by clients. This trend includes:

• Increasing use of multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to support critical business processes.
• Greater use of, and interest in, IP telephony and video streaming applications, with LANs becoming more sophisticated.
• Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms being introduced in client networks with DiffServ becoming the de facto standard for CoS implementations.

The 6 Class of Service Model gives you the ability to enjoy a greater granularity in bandwidth prioritisation and partitioning. You can choose to prioritise mission critical applications such as Siebel, SAP, Oracle and Lotus Notes into distinct prioritisation data classes. This enables you to run multiple applications simultaneously.  In addition, you are able to run multimedia applications as well as IP Voice, enabling you to gain a high level of convergence on a global platform.

The 6 CoS model provides high flexibility and scalability, enabling you to easily burst between classes without the need for complicated configurations. Changes to your network can be kept to a minimum to support the new CoS model with end to end transparency ensuring configurations occur easily and swiftly across multiple sites. With the use of the additional AOS of AAI you can maximise the performance of your network in accordance with your changing business priorities.

The Offer

The CoS model uses DiffServ Code Point.  We have developed the BT MPLS CoS model with clients and their application providers.

The 6 CoS model contains:

1. Voice – such as VoIP and PSTN breakout.
2. Assured Data – ERP applications or Real-time Multimedia – such as video conferences and other interactive services.
3. Assured Data  – ERP applications.
4. Assured Data  – ERP applications.
5. Assured Data  – ERP applications.
6. Standard – email, intranet, file transfer protocol (FTP), internet breakout telnet and other network management.

BT MPLS is proving extremely popular with small and medium enterprises as well as multi-national organisations. We have more than 2,000 clients and 65,000 ports connected to our platform globally. The service is for you if you require:

• Performance optimisation of your network applications to improve processes.
• Any-to-any connectivity – either through a meshed or partially-meshed network.
• The ability to prioritise the transmission of different types of data applications.
• Different performance and prioritisation levels for various application types.
• A network that can expand and contract easily in line with your own expansion strategy.
• LAN-to-LAN or WAN-to-WAN connectivity over private networks.

If you want to include dynamic optimisation for your network check the capabilities of our AOS from our AAI product.

BT MPLS is available in over 170 countries with full 6 Class of Service (Cos) capabilities, known as Native IP, and from more than 1200 Points of Presence (PoPs) in Europe, the Americas and the Asia Pacific Region.

Class of Service network performance guarantees

The BT MPLS 6 Class of Service (CoS) model addresses the growing need for multiple applications with different performance levels. In combination with AOS of AAI it provides you with increased visibility and control over your application performance. Current market trends include:

• Increased use of multiple ERP applications to support critical business processes.
• Greater use of and interest in IP Telephony and video streaming applications.
• Increasingly sophisticated LANs.
• Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms being introduced into client networks.
• DiffServ becoming the de facto standard for CoS implementations.

The 6 CoS model:

BT has an outstanding track record in implementing MPLS and provides solutions uniquely tailored to the requirements of your organisation. Clients as diverse as car hire companies and oil and gas service providers have benefited from the successful introduction of BT MPLS.

With more than 20 years of providing VPN services to global businesses, and network coverage across five continents, BT is at the forefront of designing, implementing and managing global IP VPNs. As a key partner with Cisco, we were one of the pioneers of commercial MPLS services.

BT offers you comprehensive service level agreements and a single point of contact, in addition to our network design and service optimisation consultancy.

With BT MPLS, we can help you match your applications to Class of Service requirements, defining and optimising the routing protocol architecture, planning migration and troubleshooting inter-working problems.

The result is the kind of flexible and powerful network service that can help you enjoy business success and growth.