No end in sight for frame networks

Frame relay is a decade old - which in the fast-paced IT world is more like being 100 than 10 - yet no one calls the venerable technology obsolete. Frame relay's stability, adaptability and evolving pricing will allow it to remain a premier WAN technology well into the future, customers and industry analysts say.

Numbers support those opinions. According to research by consulting firm Vertical Systems Group, there were 1.78 million frame ports in use worldwide last year. What's more, Vertical forecasts that frame relay revenue in the U.S. will continue to climb, increasing from $6.6 billion in 2000 to $11.9 billion by 2004.

Outside the U.S., frame is expected to grow faster. Vertical is forecasting $9.1 billion in revenue in 2004, up from $4.1 billion in 2000.

Much of frame relay's continuing appeal is that it is a mature technology. "The major reason it's still going is that it works well and it's well-defined in what it does and doesn't do," says Steven Taylor, president of consultancy Distributed Networking Associates and a Network World columnist.

Large businesses would need a compelling reason to justify the implementation of a new technology given the time and money such users have invested in building out their frame relay networks. And right now, there's no successor on the horizon.

Assessing alternatives

IP VPN often is cited as the technology most likely to replace frame relay. But, Taylor says, many IP VPN services actually rely on frame relay as their underlying transport. If these services are being marketed to established frame users, they're often described as frame relay services, he says. If the services are being pitched to new users, they might be marketed as IP VPN offerings.

The technologies that could challenge frame relay directly are DSL and cable connections, which offer speeds that generally are higher than frame relay, at lower costs.

The catch is that neither technology is widely available to business users, and where it is available, the service-level agreements (SLA) aren't as good as what frame users are accustomed to, Taylor says.

Reliability is why Pacor, a manufacturer of insulation products in New Jersey, decided to go with frame relay instead of DSL when the company needed to upgrade dial-up modems at its six locations.

Pacor's bandwidth needs had increased to where the dial modems couldn't handle the scheduling and shipping information running between the company's headquarters and its other locations, says Jim Brown, Pacor's executive vice president for IT.

Pacor opted to go with WorldCom's Bundled Frame Relay offering for a combination of 128K and 256K bit/sec lines. By going with the bundle, Pacor saved money compared with WorldCom's regular frame relay pricing. The package still wasn't as inexpensive as DSL would have been, Brown says, but he felt that DSL presented more risks than frame relay.

"We weren't sure if it was as reliable, and it sounded like there might be some security issues," he says. "We wanted to go with something that was tried and true."

Frame relay may be 10 years old, but the technology hasn't stood still. A number of recent enhancements have made frame relay more flexible for companies that have changing IT needs.

The most significant change to frame relay might be the IP-enabled frame relay services that major carriers such as AT&T, WorldCom and Sprint are offering.

IP-enabled frame costs more than a traditional frame connection. But it lets companies that have sites needing to communicate with more than one other site handle all their communications over one frame line. In the past, companies had to set up a separate point-to-point frame circuit for each site with which a location it needed to communicate.

The pricing on IP frame services is low enough that it's usually worthwhile for a location that needs to communicate with more than one other site to set up an IP-enabled frame link, Taylor says.

Recent improvements

Frame relay to ATM internetworking, also offered by major carriers, is another feature that's helped frame relay maintain its market share. If a company's corporate headquarters outgrows its frame relay connection, it can upgrade to ATM and continue to have its branch sites served through frame relay. Internetworking between the technologies is handled by the carrier within the network and is transparent to the user.

Another recent enhancement, multilink frame relay, also is designed to help users who have outgrown 1.5M bit/sec frame relay connections. By bonding multiple T-1 lines, multilink frame relay lets users get larger connections that still act as a logical, frame relay line.

The most recent frame variation, and one that isn't yet widely available, is DSL-to-frame service.

AT&T and WorldCom currently offers DSL to frame in several markets in areas where DSL is available. The service lets companies connect some of their sites back into a corporate frame network through DSL, saving the companies money.

WAN technologies have become so mixed that it's now difficult to tell whether a service is being offered over IP, frame, ATM or a combination of the three, Taylor says.

Ultimately, Taylor says, users won't care as much about the technology underlying a service as they will about SLAs and pricing. Which means that as long as frame relay can continue to offer stable service at reasonable prices, it could be around for another 10 years.

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