Poll results: Internet traffic transport options
I was somewhat surprised by the results of my recent “Do you use MPLS to transport Internet traffic?” poll. I had assumed that most Service Provider networks today use MPLS-based BGP-free core, but almost half of the respondents transport Internet traffic natively.
Obviously you have to take the results with a grain of salt:
- We can’t be sure that all respondents are indeed Service Providers; most enterprise users obviously transport Internet traffic natively.
- In a democratic poll like this one, an engineer operating a small network with a few routers (where you can have a small default-free part running BGP) and an engineer working with a huge global network get one vote each.
- Last but not least, as Bad designer pointed out, the four options you had are not exclusive; if your network is large enough, you could use different mechanisms in different parts of your network.