The newly formed MFA Forum will announce next week that it is close to finalizing two key interoperability agreements: one to allow interworking between ATM and frame relay and an IP-MPLS control plane and another to remove the 7 gigabit per second ceiling on ATM transport. Both items are currently in the straw ballot phase, the last phase in which forum members can provide feedback, and are headed shortly for final ballots, according to Andy Malis, chief technologist for Tellabs and president and chairman of the MFA Forum, the group created this summer from the merger of the MPLS/Frame Relay Forum with the ATM Forum. The forum held its first formal meeting as the MFA Forum in Ottawa in July.

The interoperability agreement on interworking should be finalized by the end of 2005, Malis said.

The new specifications are good examples of the kind of work on which the MFA will be focused going forward – advancing interworking of current data services and continuing to improve on existing technologies, he said. One key goal is to allow service providers to maximize the existing investment in data networks while continuing to improve and evolve their services, Malis said.

“We are recognizing that some of these technologies will continue to exist for a long time in providers’ networks,” said John Rutemiller, principal engineer at Marconi and an MFA board member who chairs the ATM Architecture Working Group . “At the same time, people are going to be putting in MPLS networks.”

The interworking specification would allow data services to be transported over networks that use a combination of ATM and MPLS transport. This is important in the transition period, when multiple data services are in play, because it allows service providers to upgrade their networks to MPLS based on their own time frame and business plan, Rutemiller said.

“They don’t have to add MPLS to a PoP just because they’ve put it elsewhere,” he said. “They can choose to do it at their convenience rather than being dictated by something else’s.”

The higher speed ATM capability is taking into account the popularity of 10 Gigabit services, particularly for storage networks, Rutemiller added.

“In the early days of ATM, 155 megabits was considered blindingly fast,” he said. “As 10 Gig interfaces came out, ATM ran into problems because you couldn’t signal a connection faster than 7 Gigabits.”

As a result, applications requiring the higher speeds ran into problems when the network solution included ATM transport. The High Speed Connection specification will enable ATM networks to support commercial service speeds for the foreseeable future, he added.

Going forward, the MFA Forum will continue to focus on the convergence of frame, ATM and MPLS services, Malis said. The Service Provider Council of the forum provides much of the direction for its work, he added, feeding technical requirements to the other working groups.

“We will continue to produce Interoperability Agreements (IAs) that meet the Forum’s Service Provider Council requirements, and add value and contribute to other standards efforts,” he commented. As part of that process, the MFA also creates test plans to support multi-vendor, multi-service interoperability.

The group is reaching out to end-users for their feedback while continuing to expand geographically as well, reaching out particularly to the Asian region.

“We have already added members there – China Telecom, ZTE, Huawei – but we want to add more,” he said.