Frame Relay Group Sets Road Map
By CHUCK MOOZAKIS, Tuesday, May 5, 1998, 8:10 p.m. ET.
pubs.cmpnet.com
Las Vegas -- The Frame Relay Forum,
perhaps scarred by wounds created by last
month's highly publicized crash of AT&T's
frame relay network, took advantage of this
week's N+I show to apply some salve to its
reputation.
Rosemary Cochran, principal and co-founder
of Vertical Systems Group, said technologies
such as voice-over-frame relay, SNA access
and managed services will spur dramatic
growth in frame relay, from 1997's total of
$6.1 billion to more than $14 billion in 2000.
"Frame relay is a viable market; it is not an
interim technology," she said.
Developments such as virtual private
networks, she said, will not pose a competitive
threat to frame relay; instead, frame relay can
be used as a framework enabling companies
to blend their VPN and frame relay
deployments. "Frame relay is already in
425,000 dedicated sites; it is too costly to rip
out these sites in favor of VPN," she said.
Frame Relay Forum participants also spelled
out modifications they are examining in order
to close some of the performance gap
between frame relay and ATM. The goal,
according to Larry Greenstein, the Forum's
vice president of technology, is for frame relay
to have 80 percent of ATM's
quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities by year's
end. Operation, administration and
maintenance (OAM) support, meanwhile, will
also be built into frame relay during the same
time frame. With OAM, managers will be able
to oversee frame relay networks more flexibly.
A final modification, multilink frame relay,
permitting managers to add additional T1
bandwidth on demand to their frame relay
deployments, will also be added, Greenstein
said.
For More N+I stories |
