Carriers push users to move off legacy nets

Frame relay customers take note: The clock is ticking.

Sprint says it will turn off its legacy data networks in four years. At that point any stragglers will be forced to migrate to one of the carrier's IP network services and backbone - and away from tried-and-true frame and ATM.

Sprint says it has talked with all of its frame relay customers about this plan, which it calls "data simplification," and about the variety of services they could move to today.

Although AT&T and MCI have not publicly said when they will turn off their frame relay and ATM networks, both are encouraging users with current and new services to move to their IP MPLS networks.

According to Vertical Systems Group, there are more than 1.4 million frame relay ports deployed in the U.S. Of those, only 5% are being used to access IP services. The vast majority of these ports still are connecting to traditional Layer 2 frame relay networks.

The writing is on the wall, though, and Sprint has been the most forthcoming with its consolidation plans.

"We're offering an easy, cost-effective migration for customers that lets them use the same equipment and their traffic is encapsulated and sent over our IP network," says Vicki Warker, vice president of marketing and products for Sprint Business Solutions.

Sprint for the last six months has been notifying customers that it plans to phase out its legacy data networks and offer the option of Layer 2 or Layer 3 VPN service, she says.

One customer that has been notified by Sprint is Finlay Fine Jewelry, a New York retailer with sales counters in 963 department stores nationwide.

"I'm fully aware that Sprint is contemplating phasing out frame relay and I wholeheartedly embrace their technology choice, which is MPLS," says Finlay CIO Jim Giantomenico. Finlay, which uses multiple services from Sprint, is about to swap out its 16 dedicated frame relay links for Sprint's Layer 2 frame relay service.

Giantomenico says he expects the deployment to begin next month and be finished by September.

"What we are getting is a defined network. One of the reasons I got excited about this is because we will be getting better service levels and prioritization with MPLS," he says.

Sprint's Layer 2 frame relay service will let Giantomenico prioritize traffic into different classes of service, a feature that was never available with frame relay.

Giantomenico also says he's more comfortable moving to a Layer 2 rather than a Layer 3 frame relay service. He says he's more familiar with Layer 2 networking and he likes that his traffic will be routed via virtual circuits rather than across any open route on the carrier's backbone. The latter is true for Layer 3 frame services, which route encapsulated frame packets over an IP network alongside IP packets from any of the carrier's customers.

While Giantomenico is looking forward to the new features he'll get with Sprint's offering, one analyst cautions that network consolidation onto a single backbone opens the door for more drastic network failures.

"All of the [interexchange carriers] are looking at consolidating around a common IP MPLS core," says David Willis, vice president of enterprise communications at Gartner. "When carriers consolidate this far there are more areas where they can run into operation problems. The best historical reference is the frame relay network meltdowns that AT&T and MCI had in '98 and '99."

In 1998, about 6,000 AT&T frame relay users were left in the lurch when the carrier's network went dark for about 24 hours because of a software problem. In 1999, about 3,400 MCI frame relay customers suffered excruciatingly slow performance or lost connectivity altogether after the carrier experienced a software problem with one of its switch vendors.

"In the end, these networks are run by people, and switches and routers that run software," Willis says. "And we know those things fail."

In the past, customers would use multiple services from one carrier to ensure redundancy. If all traffic is sent over the same backbone, users will not have redundancy. "We'll probably see more customers adopt a multi-carrier strategy as a result of network consolidation," Willis says.