At the tender age of 8, the Frame Relay Forum is having an identity crisis.
In August, the forum's technical committee will decide whether it should continue to develop and set standards for the versatile packet technology or scale back and acknowledge that the forum's work is substantially done.
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ATM already surpasses frame relay at supporting QoS and makes it possible to converge voice, data and video on one network. Even forum members wonder if it makes sense to keep expanding frame relay features in the face of more fully featured alternatives.
Lori Dreher, president of the Frame Relay Forum, says: "We don't have a true frame relay class of service or QoS, although some vendors do similar things that are proprietary. The forum certainly hasn't dealt with it from a technical perspective. Whether we should is one of the questions."
"The kind of work we are doing maybe doesn't need to be done in a forum environment and is better off left for vendor-specific implementations," says Doug O'Leary, the Frame Relay Forum technical committee chairman.
Given that such doubts exist, O'Leary has asked the general membership whether the technical committee should scale back its work, go into sleeper mode, as O'Leary calls it, or forge ahead.
The answer is clearer to others. "The forum is getting bogged down trying to find busy work to do," says Liza Henderson, senior broadband consultant with TeleChoice, a telecom research firm in Boston. "Frame relay has matured to the point where it is a technology that is well understood and implemented."
Analysts say frame relay will continue its heady growth for a while, but the analysts see a plateau on the horizon.
"In another couple of years frame relay will reach its peak, stabilize for a couple years, then go into decline," says Steve Sazegari, principal with Tele.Mac in Foster City, Calif.
As countries with poor public network infrastructures modernize, frame relay may never be a factor, he predicts. ATM or developing optical technology such as packet over SONET will leapfrog frame relay, Sazegari says.
One sign that the forum is at a turning point is the recent difficulty the technical committee had reaching consensus on multilink frame relay - the ability to logically bond two separate frame relay access circuits.
"A number of members argued [multilink frame relay schemes] should be vendor-specific. An equal number argued they wanted an implementation agreement to standardize it," O'Leary says. The committee finally decided to bring the proposal up for a vote this fall by the full forum.
The struggle may indicate a change is needed. "It's a waste of time to spend months working on an implementation agreement that never gets implemented," he says.
The forum might do better determining how frame relay fits in with other technologies, says Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a technology assessment firm in Voorhees, N.J.
Network executives may want to use frame relay switches as part of a network using MPLS to speed traffic.
"That could rightfully be addressed by the Frame Relay Forum. The Internet Engineering Task Force could address it, but the answer wouldn't be optimized for frame relay," he says.
Also, the question of how to bind together IP and frame relay networks will inevitably become an issue, so the forum could spell out how to do it ahead of time using established standards, Nolle says. The forum could specialize in writing such application notes, he says.
But Nolle says it would be a mistake to disband because that would signal the technology is in decline, which it isn't.
"It's the most successful new service we've ever had. There is more revenue from frame relay than from the Internet," Nolle says. International Data Corp. projects the sale of frame relay ports will grow an average 15% per year between 1997 and 2003.
And frame relay is key to supporting new IP services today. AT&T's IP-Enabled Frame Relay service mixes IP routing with frame relay virtual circuits using MPLS. That lets all sites on a network connect to all other sites without needing to buy a full mesh of virtual circuits.
Those types of IP virtual private network (VPN)services will ultimately overtake frame relay networks, predicts Rich Glasberg, manager of data communication for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But that won't happen for years.
In the meantime, many enterprises will rely on frame relay for wide-area connections, including the 350-node, fully meshed network Glasberg oversees.
Until the day VPNs rule, he wants the forum's technical committee to be ready. Frame relay may seem mature today, but unforeseen challenges could arise that will call for additional standards.
"I understand they have covered seven-eighths of the issues, but the truth is the world is still a moving target. If an issue does come up, who would handle it?" he says.
While, as a user, Glasberg still sees value in the forum, the group itself has no end users as members.
The forum is 69% hardware vendors, 16% service providers and 15% academics. Membership has hovered between 135 and 145 companies for the past three years despite mergers and acquisitions among members, according to Dreher.
She says the current soul-searching by the forum is about deciding how to continue meeting members' needs as well as those of end users.
"I guess the question is, 'How do we want to evolve the forum?' We want to give members value for their membership dollars. But we also want to make frame relay more meaningful within user networks the way that they really use them," Dreher says.
RELATED LINKS
Network World Fusion Focus on Frame Relay
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Frame Relay Forum news
From the Forum.
A possible competitor to T-3 frame relay
Network World Fusion Focus on Frame Relay, 9/8/98.
Will multilink frame relay catch on?
Network World Fusion Focus on Frame Relay, 5/12/99.
Trends for 1999: Interworking between frame relay and IP networks
