Go CCIE Go!! - A Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert

So if you look at your routing table on any given router, how many routes do you have? Now, how many different next-hops do you have?
If you could lump your entire routing table into a smaller table with ISP-1, ISP-2, ISP-3, and Internal as your only four viable choices for any information, wouldn’t that be more efficient?
It’s all about speed and efficiency. Although I do appreciate you not wanting to believe everything you read as propaganda!
Scott
—–Original Message—– From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of Tim Sent: Monday, August 21, 2006 10:52 AM To: ccielab@groupstudy.com Subject: MPLS speed — switching vs IP routing
Hi guys,

I’m reading lots of different material on MPLS and all these sources talk about how one of the benefits of MPLS is speed.

They all say that label swapping is faster than route table lookup. They also talk about other benefits to using MPLS but I’m wondering how much of a benefit is speed.

I’m not sure I’m buying this. My hunch is that this speed “benefit” is being propagated mostly by MARKETING people, not technical engineers.

Why would doing a label lookup instead of a route table lookup be any faster?

And, even if we accept the premise that switching labeled packets through a network is faster than plain old ip routing, how much faster is this really?

Are there some large networks where the difference in speed makes a big difference in overall performance?

Have there been any studies that quantify how much faster using MPLS is versus legacy IP routing?

So, basically, I’m trying to get some perspective on this speed thing to understand if this is negligible benefit, a minor benefit or a major benefit and under what scenarios would result in which level of benefit.

Thanks, Tim