Hello everyone,
I currently work in a large ISP/backbone environment where we frequently deal with traffic engineering challenges caused by fiber cuts and capacity loss events.
Today, most of our traffic engineering is still handled manually using RSVP-TE/LDP based approaches. In some scenarios, we may lose hundreds of gigabits or even multiple terabits of available capacity, requiring constant tunnel adjustments and operational intervention.
Because of that, I have been studying Segment Routing (SR-MPLS) combined with centralized PCE approaches and would like to hear real-world feedback from engineers who already operate this architecture in production.
Some questions I would love to hear opinions about:
- How effective is SR-TE + PCE in real production environments for autonomous traffic engineering?
- Does it significantly reduce operational complexity compared to traditional RSVP-TE?
- How well does it behave during major backbone failures and large traffic shifts?
- Are there any scaling or operational caveats that became apparent only after deployment?
- Have you seen measurable improvements in convergence, capacity utilization or network stability?
- For medium/large ISP backbones, is SR-MPLS currently the preferred migration path over traditional MPLS/LDP architectures?
Our environment is multi-vendor and currently heavily MPLS/LDP based, so I'm especially interested in migration experiences and operational lessons learned.
Would really appreciate insights from engineers who have deployed this at scale.
Thanks!
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Guilherme Contino
IP Network Engineer
Link Brasil Telecomunicações
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