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AT&T drops central-office FRAD service

Shifts managed SNA focus to routers as multiprotocol frame relay networks begin to dominate.

7/27/98

By David Rohde

Long-distance carriers' all-out run to convince you to let them manage your networks has stumbled into a hurdle, thanks to the IP revolution.

AT&T officials last week confirmed they are closing one of their managed SNA-over-frame relay services that was introduced less than two years ago. The AT&T Frame Relay Central Office FRAD (frame relay access device) Option is biting the dust due to the widespread desire for frame relay networks that handle both legacy and IP traffic.

Started in November 1996, Central Office FRAD (COFRAD) was designed to take only SNA traffic, typically accumulated over local multidrop leased lines, and convert it for shipment over a long-distance frame relay cloud without forcing customers to assemble and disassemble frames at user sites.

Analysts believe AT&T's action signals an industrywide trend. "That service has underperformed for everybody in the market," said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a technology-assessment consulting firm in Voorhees, N.J.

MCI Communications Corp. still maintains a native Synchronous Data Link Control offering akin to a central-office FRAD service. But instead of a stand-alone service, MCI's CO FRAD is being incorporated as a minor branch-office adjunct into MCI's networkMCI Enterprise Blue service announced last month.

However, instead of being a FRAD, the core of Enterprise Blue will be a souped-up Cisco Systems, Inc. data-center router that can entirely replace front-end processors for SNA hosts (NW, July 13, page 29).

AT&T will continue to maintain a managed program in which the FRAD sits on the customer premises. Since that service was introduced in November 1996, AT&T has added Cisco gear to the original support of Motorola, Inc. Vanguard FRADs, said Bill Callahan, director of managed-network solutions in the AT&T Solutions unit of the giant carrier.

Still, the death of CO FRAD disappointed some SNA private-line users who felt it was their best frame relay migration option. One insurance industry network manager complained that AT&T was raising his potential cost by forcing him to place a FRAD in every branch rather than in a central office economically linked to 10 sites over a multidrop leased line. "There's no other protocol that can run on a multidrop set-up other than SNA," he said.

Yet CO FRAD's demise reflects the ongoing difficulty traditional FRAD and other branch-office vendors have encountered as routers incorporate more and more legacy-protocol conversion tasks. "The CO FRAD has kind of died," said Paul Wallner, president of Hypercom Network Systems in Phoenix. "We never sold [a CO FRAD] to anyone."

And for stand-alone SNA applications, "the problem is that even with CO FRADs and a multidrop line, you cannot make enough savings to justify the [frame relay] service," Nolle said.

Not enough SNA users were willing to risk the move to frame relay for whatever savings would be left over after the carrier's management fee was added, he explained.

AT&T officials last week insisted that managed FRADs on the customer premises are still appropriate for financial institutions with a separate net for automated teller machines or other critical applications.

"If they have any funky protocols, such as the various derivatives of bisync, sometimes the FRAD offers a larger degree of support," said Mark O'Leary, director of AT&T's Data Technical Marketing unit. But AT&T officials said the bulk of even the SNA-over-frame relay market is going through routers.