nd, DiffServ does not offer strong bandwidth guarantees but scales well. The RSVP scalability enhancements enable network managers to rely on RSVP's admission control and control-plane strengths while allowing DiffServ to handle the forwarding-plane functions of classification, policing and queuing. 13.6.4 Compagnie Financière Alcatel Alcatel's approach to traffic engineering for MPLS networks seeks to provide: centralised and multi-vendor traffic engineering 30% more efficient usage of MPLS networks integration with an MPLS performance management tool. In a non traffic-engineered network, traffic takes the shortest path to its destina- tion. In this configuration, traffic is by definition uncontrolled and QoS is hard to control. The result is network "hot-spots" with congested links, while most links are little used. A workaround solution that is used by many carriers is to over-provision, increasing the capacity of links in the hot areas. By some measures, average link uti- lization in a backbone is 15% breaching even the 80:20 rule. Hence over-provisioning is economically inefficient. Further, the method itself is hard to apply because rapid traffic growth makes it difficult to predict where hot-spots will arise. A bad predic- tion will lead to an investment where the additional capacity will not be used, while the real hot-spots remain hot. Alcatel's product "ALMA Vision - Traffic Engineering" is a centrally functioning MPLS network optimization tool. It implements algorithms that increase the overall bandwidth used for services by up to 30%. In multi-vendor networks, ALMA can activate Label Switched Paths (LSPs). An LSP is a virtual end-to-end connection used in MPLS networks to simulate circuit-switched networks. Once LSPs are acti- vated, ALMA can update parts of the network using its "GRATE" algorithms. Most networks contain a mixture of traffic under MPLS and other protocols, like pure IP. Therefore, it is usually impractical to predict the bandwidth that can be reserved on a link for LSPs owing to the s