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It wasn't obvious TCP/IP would win for a surprisingly long time[0]. IIUC it was MPLS that addressed the latency issues at the backbone layer for TCP/IP. That, at least IIUC, obviated the major latency advantage ATM had over pure IP backbones.

[0] https://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip/articles/tdc0598cover1_side1...

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MPLS didn’t really address latency issues in the core - it scaled PE to PE connectivity by removing full table lookups at the P layer and replacing it with truncated labels.

However the main long-staying effect of MPLS is enabling L2 and L3 VPNs (VRFs).

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