Internet service providers (ISPs) soon may be able to offer better service to users because of a new networking standard called multi-protocol label switching (MPLS).
Fore Systems' director of technology Colin Rhodes said there still was a lot of confusion among ISPs about the standard.
MPLS is a hybrid of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and Internet protocol (IP), and is intended to give better performance and make better use of network resources than IP alone.
This is done by developing a new set of signalling and control-plane protocols, which should make it possible to perform traffic engineering over an IP-based network.
Traffic engineering is the process of ensuring that data travelling across a network makes the best use of the bandwidth and other network resources.
IP alone simply looks for the least expensive path across the network, resulting in much of the data flowing over the same connections and slowing the process.
However, traffic engineering already was an inherent feature of ATM, Mr Rhodes said.