US WEST, Inc. recently introduced a suite of frame relay services designed to handle temperamental SNA traffic and guarantee performance.
The service offerings from US WEST's !nterprise division include managing the frame relay service and access device at the customer's site.
The services also enable a user to tie SNA traffic into a frame relay network without installing new hardware.
The new services come with guaranteed network delays of less than 70 msec in one direction.
With the new offerings, customers can establish service-level agreements that guarantee latency, frame discard rates, network availability and mean time to repair problems.
The guarantees will help ease the minds of SNA network managers who are apprehensive about using frame relay, according to Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a technology assessment firm in Voorhees, N.J.
The !nterprise managed frame relay service includes the FRAD, a frame relay line with priority-based SNA permanent virtual circuits (PVC) and network monitoring, fault detection and repair.
!nterprise also offers Central Office FRAD service for customers who want to send SNA traffic over a public frame relay network without installing new hardware.
SNA traditionally has been carried over dedicated point-to-point wide-area links.
The attraction of frame relay is that it reduces customer bills by eliminating more costly leased lines.
The new services, available nationally, put US WEST's !nterprise division into direct competition with MCI Communi- cations Corp., Sprint Corp., AT&T and regional frame relay carriers.
Sprint guarantees a maximum delay across its network of less than 115 msec for a 56K bit/sec circuit and 55 msec for a T-1.
MCI's frame relay for SNA service gives users the option of assigning high, medium or low priority to their PVCs.
While SNA can be given priority, there are no performance guarantees.
& !nterprise: (800)328-2879
