MPLS – Dual Last Mile Connectivity on Single Router:

Pain Area and aspects for consideration:

• Last mile goes down frequently.
• Mission critical application hampers.
• Should customer takes 2 different Service provider MPLS for all the locations?
• Will it be a cost effective solution?
• What Routing protocol needs to be run between CE-PE?
• What would the default-gateway IP address?
• How many ports required connecting Dual last mile?

- Solution Proposed

This is one of scenario where customer can have Dual last mile connectivity on MPLS VPN either HUB and Spoke or Mesh Topology. Most of failure happens at Last mile end of the Service Provider which leads to high down time and less availability of the mission critical sites which affects business processes. 2 MPLS Service providers at every location offers you best Uptime but also increase Cost component, so it’s better to have Dual last mile connectivity from one service provider and terminate the circuit at Single CPE with Dual Power. Customers have to make sure that Service provider does not offer same last connectivity at any location unless if any link goes down that site would be isolated because both the last miles are same, so one link should be on Terrestrial last mile and other would be on RF or use other service provider last mile connectivity or customer can have dual POP as well on top of it for ensure higher redundancy.

Both links should be terminated on Single Router and Router should have minimum 2 Layer3 port + 1 Layer2 port with BGP supported. Can configure Static routing with IP Tracking Command or use BGP as a Routing Protocol which ensure automatic failover on secondary link if primary link goes down without any manual intervention and users would experience seamless network connectivity at their end, but only single point of failure is CPE in this scenario and rest all are redundant network.

Technical Arrangement:

1. Topology would be either HUB and Spoke or MESH.
2. Terminate both the Last miles Links into Single CE Router.
3. CE-PE Recommendation routing protocols would be eBGP with Private AS No.
4. Default Gateway IP Address will be MPLS CE Router of all the LAN side equipment.
5. CE Router should have 2 Layer3 port + 1 Layer2 port.
6. Use BGP attributes Weight/Local Preference for manipulate outgoing traffic and As path prepend for influencing incoming traffic.