These next four newsletters will mark the end of an era for this newsletter. It started as the “Frame Relay Newsletter” in 1998, and, after another analyst group wrote approximately eight issues and decided there was nothing left to write about, Steve and Joanie Wexler took the reins and started on June 1, 1998. Several years later, Joanie decided to cut back on the number of newsletters and Jim joined Steve in providing these bi-weekly updates.
In case you’re interested, that amounts to about 696 weeks, so, since very few weeks were skipped for holidays, it’s roughly 1,380 times that you will have heard from us. Thus, it only seems fitting that these last newsletters focus on what has – and what has not – changed in these 13-plus years.
The first newsletter was titled “Frame Relay: Still Just a Replacement for Leased Lines?” At that point, we were still in the transition from leased point-to-point dedicated transmission services, usually at speeds from 56K/64Kbps to T-1/E-1 lines. And, due to the nature of the pricing and replacing an existing infrastructure, the primary network architecture was rather unimaginative. We noted “In fact, the 1998 Frame Relay Market Study at Webtorials.Com shows a whopping 63% of public-service frame relay customers are still configuring star, or hub, networks that allow distributed sites to communicate with each other through a central location.”
Our concern at that point was that the any-to-any nature of the coming infrastructure would need to evolve to a more distributed design. However, we were also still in an extremely price-sensitive time (when bandwidth probably cost an order of magnitude more per bit-per second), so a couple of the avenues that were suggested were looking at usage-based pricing and switched virtual circuits.
So now, even though it seems like only yesterday, you probably have more data throughput on your cell phone than was supplied to many intermediate sized data centers.
By the way, even though this newsletter is going away soon, we would love to keep in touch with you. To make sure you have continuous access to this communication, please let us know by clicking here.
