The IETF Thursday threw a birthday party for one of its most successful standards: Multi-Protocol Label Switching.

The Internet’s leading standards body hosted a panel discussion outlining the reasons why the 12-year-old protocol has been so widely deployed and such a big moneymaker for carriers.

“MPLS is one of our wildly successful protocol suites,” said Loa Andersson, co-chair of the IETF’s MPLS Working Group and the principal networking architect at the Swedish Research Institute, Acreo AB. Andersson served as moderator for the panel, which was hosted by the Internet Architecture Board, a sister organization to the IETF.

Here are the seven reasons why MPLS has proven so popular:

1. MPLS embraced IP

2. MPLS is flexible

3. MPLS is protocol neutral

4. MPLS is pragmatic

5. MPLS is adaptable

6. MPLS supports metrics

7. MPLS scales

Read the full article on NetworkWorld.com…