Demands for speed and quality of service drive evolution of frame relay services

As private-to-public network migration gathers momentum and accessing high-volume Web sites becomes a daily business routine, the frame relay market boom is continuing. But LAN users seeking traditional bandwidth-only services are no longer the driving force.

It is clear that what has been good enough for the LAN market will not suffice in today's Internet/intranet, public network age.

Service providers must be able to offer fast, scalable and rock-solid frame relay service for mission-critical applications. This includes service-level agreements (SLA) based on throughput and delay, as well as availability guarantees that go beyond ensuring that traffic will arrive to guaranteeing it will arrive. These demands are giving rise to frame relay technology enhancements that carry a number of benefits for service providers and their customers.

Rapid progress

To keep pace with the new forces driving the market, frame relay technology now is evolving to provide high-speed access and quality of service (QoS). This includes improvements that enable service providers to bolster frame relay speed and scalability while retaining its traditional cost efficiency.

Frame relay also is beginning to provide QoS capabilities to help service providers meet the demands of users considering migrating to public networks as

a less-expensive alternative to leased lines. Frame relay QoS gives service providers a means of offering differentiated, application-specific services at different price points. Some of these services include frame relay for LANs, frame relay for SNA and frame relay for voice.

Now that the technology has evolved, the rush is on to deliver value-added frame relay services.

Indeed, some service providers have already announced QoS on frame relay and have begun writing SLAs, although their networks are not quite ready to make this guarantee. Recognizing the competitive advantages to be gained, these service providers have decided to begin selling first and then upgrade their networks to support these agreements later.

The new service classes that enable advanced frame relay services for SNA, voice, Internet, intranet and LAN traffic include:

Real Time Variable Frame Rate, which provides committed bandwidth, low delay, delay variation and frame loss. It enables users to write SLAs with specified delivery characteristics for delay-sensitive traffic.

Non-Real Time Variable Frame Rate, which provides committed bandwidth, moderate delay and low frame loss. It enables LAN-to-LAN and business-class Internet/intranet access services.

Available/Unspecified Frame Rate, which provides a best-effort service using any remaining bandwidth. It enables e-mail, file transfer and residential Internet access services.

Offering these new service classes is a departure from the days when traditional frame relay service was provided with committed information rate capability only and limited scope for differentiation. Service providers now are recognizing that customers want to be able to select a service from a menu of choices that best fits their needs. And users are willing to pay more for a low-latency service than a best-effort service.

In response, service providers are repositioning their offerings for specific duties, such as SNA interconnect service and voice over data, among others, and marketing them in terms of the problems they solve. This broadens the market by simplifying offerings and enabling service providers to create a wide range of packages that better match the way customers want to consume services.

Net management

The evolution of frame relay technology, of necessity, includes network management. Management packages now must provide subscribers with throughput, delay, availability and utilization information and offer proof that these service classes were delivered. The packages can do this via printed reports or customer network management capability, in which users can directly monitor their portion of the network. Underscoring the ongoing importance of frame relay, the Frame Relay Forum now is moving to standardize QoS classes with common nomenclature and definitions so customers can compare them ef- fectively. Work on the frame relay QoS standard now is underway and contributions to date include specific performance values for frame loss and frame transfer delay.

Frame relay is gaining broader appeal by addressing the needs of a changing market. It enables service providers to generate new revenues with a wide range of offerings and enables end users to pay only for the priority levels and services they need. Sullebarger is a senior manager of product marketing for network equipment vendor Ascend Communications, Inc., Core Systems Division. He can be reached at (800) 621-9578.