IXC offers cut-rate frame relay service

AUSTIN, TEXAS - Does the country really need another frame relay carrier? It does, because the major providers' prices are getting out of hand.

Lowering the bar 56K bit/sec ports: IXC: $162 Qwest: $190 MCI WorldCom: $268 AT&T: $295 T-1 ports: IXC: $1,325 Qwest: $1,595 MCI WorldCom: $2,327 AT&T: $2,690 Note: Listed prices are before term, volume and negotiated discounts. Sources: AT&T, IXC, MCI WorldCom, Qwest

That's the belief of IXC Communications, a new national wholesale carrier that is just now stepping into the enterprise network market.

The IXC frame relay service for users, dubbed Eclipse SmartWAN, features prices that are little more than half of AT&T's. The rates even undercut those of Qwest, which late last year broke into the frame relay market with aggressive prices and service-level agreements (NW, Dec. 14, 1998, page 1).

The terms and conditions of the IXC service, revealed here exclusively and for the first time, are built around a simplified port and permanent virtual circuit (PVC) structure.

Under standard Eclipse SmartWAN service, IXC is offering only five port speeds for the host site - 56K bit/sec, 128K bit/sec, 256K bit/sec, 512K bit/sec and T-1. The carrier then provides a single, plain-vanilla branch site offering of a 56K bit/sec port with 16K bit/sec of always-guaranteed bandwidth, or committed information rate (CIR), back to the host site for $195 per month.

IXC discourages meshing, meaning the service is designed for remote-to-host applications rather than data or voice communications among branch offices. Unlike MCI WorldCom and Qwest, IXC does not offer switched virtual circuits, which are usage-based circuits between any two sites that do not require an advance bandwidth reservation.

Users should not judge the new offering based on price alone, analysts caution. The Big 3 carriers have been raising their frame relay prices but have also enhanced those services with network-performance tools, applications modeling and other services, says Steven Taylor, president of Distributed Networking Architects in Greensboro, N.C.

"That's opening up a place in the market for the generic, comes-in-a-plain-brown-wrapper frame relay service like this," Taylor says.

IXC is known mostly as a wholesale fiber carrier with a freshly minted national OC-12 (622M bit/sec) network. It recently installed 25 Newbridge Networks frame relay/ATM switches to enable its resale carriers to offer retail frame relay.

But IXC officials found they had to set up a support infrastructure to handle this business anyway, so they decided to offer frame relay directly to users.

That's where the price benefits come in. "Obviously [carrier] switch prices have come down, and companies like IXC have a very substantial amount of excess bandwidth available," Taylor says.

IXC: (800) 984-9253