Frame relay all the rage at N+I
By David Rohde, Tim Greene and Denise Pappalardo
Network World, 10/26/98
Atlanta
NetWorld+Interop 98 here last week was abuzz with talk about the potential of converging voice and data over IP.
But for users who don't want to wait to reap convergence benefits, a series of frame relay announcements at the show could have an immediate impact.
Among last week's developments that may appeal to those users was MCI WorldCom's introduction of a service that will let companies build secure hybrid networks consisting of frame relay and Internet connections.
Separately, Equant Network Services unveiled an offering that lets customers make intracompany voice calls over their frame relay networks. Also at the show, GTE debuted frame relay management services.
While frame relay took its lumps earlier this year in the wake of AT&T's big network outage, the technology is a staple of corporate networks and a platform for multimedia applications. Speaking at a Frame Relay Forum event, Gartner Group Research Director Jay Pultz predicted that the number of frame relay sites will reach one million next year.
Users at the conference said they're fascinated by the prospect of running voice over their frame relay WANs and intrigued by the possibility of integrating frame relay and IP networks.
However, users also said frame relay is becoming increasingly complex.
Frame relay meets the 'Net
MCI WorldCom's Frame Relay Internet Gateway service is designed to let current frame relay customers securely link their legacy networks to the Internet.
The company is equipping six of its frame relay switching centers across the U.S. with firewall servers/secure gateways from Check Point Software Technologies.
Frame relay customers will be able to map dedicated permanent virtual circuits (PVC) across their frame networks to connect to one or more secure MCI gateways. The gateways then directly connect to the Internet backbone of MCIWorldCom's UUNET subsidiary.
While users today dedicate PVCs to Internet access, no other service provider has offered this capability with security features such as 40- to 128-bit key encryption and user authentication. Such security is essential for users who have been using virtually private frame relay services until now.
"Security is absolutely required for us; we wouldn't even consider such a service without it," says Bob Galovic, managing director of information resources at the American Automobile Association, a Heathrow, Fla., company that has a nationwide frame relay network managed by AT&T.
AAA is interested in IP-based virtual private network (VPN) services, but moving in that direction today would require the company to reconstruct its entire WAN, Galovic says.
"A new network service that extends the life of our existing network is attractive," he says.
AT&T has not offered AAA such a service option, though Galovic says he hopes the carrier will soon. Galovic says he drew up a "list of things to talk to AT&T about" after he saw the MCI WorldCom service announcement.
But Galovic will be waiting longer than he may like for AT&T to take action. "We're not sure users are ready to give up the control of their firewalls yet," says Robert Marschall, product manager at AT&T WorldNet.
While AT&T is not saying it will never support this type of service, the company has no plans to do so today.
Like AT&T, Sprint allows its frame relay customers to map PVCs to its IP network. But Sprint also is not deploying "network firewalls," says Mike Fitz, the carrier's group manager of IP service product management.
"Firewall vendors don't have the technology that will allow service providers to support multiple users on a single device," Fitz says.
In fact, MCI WorldCom will be deploying separate Check Point Firewall-1 servers for each customer at the carrier's switching sites.
"What MCI WorldCom is doing is a step in the right direction because a large number of users realize that security is not their core expertise and wish to outsource their security needs," says Greg Howard, director at Infonetics Research, a consulting firm in San Jose, Calif.
"The problem MCI WorldCom will face is in scaling and managing all of those firewalls," Howard says. "It's extremely difficult to manage firewalls in the hundreds and thousands."
While Check Point's firewalls have been designed for enterprise networks rather than carrier networks, it makes sense that MCI WorldCom would choose the Check Point products initially.
UUNET is using these firewalls for its managed firewall service today, and its engineers will likely be the ones who will manage the gateways for the new MCI WorldCom service.
MCI WorldCom's Frame Relay Internet Gateway is available now, and comes with a hefty price. Users will pay $2,495 for 1.544M bit/sec worth of bandwidth to the Internet gateway.
If they want to use security features, users will pay an additional $4,000 per month. On the low end, if users only need 128K bit/sec worth of bandwidth to the gateway, they will pay $375 per month without any security options.
Equant gets into the act
Equant, the newly independent international packet network with roots in the airline industry, used the show to unveil iVAD, a service that allows users to place intraenterprise phone calls over Equant's frame relay service.
With iVAD, which stands for Integrated Voice and Data, Equant swaps out the Cisco 2500 router it typically installs on the customer's premises, for a Cisco 3810 multiservice access device.
That product, introduced at the beginning of the year, adds PBX connectivity ports to a branch office router and packetizes the voice streams for shipment over a corporate WAN.
Intracompany phone calls are routed over the Equant global frame relay network for delivery to other enterprise sites, bypassing regular international tolls and even the international IP telephony charges of emerging carriers.
Users who employ iVAD have to make one other change: If they have one frame relay PVC running between any two given sites, they must install a second.
The original PVC is reserved for what the user deems as critical or latency-sensitive data applications that may need to take advantage of frame relay's bursting capability.
The other PVC is reserved for voice traffic and noncritical data, such as messaging or other traditional LAN-to-LAN applications.
"That way, bursting won't occur on the voice PVC," says Laurence Huntley, executive vice president of marketing for Equant. Huntley cautions that the voice piece of iVAD can't be bought separately; users must subscribe to Equant's full frame relay service, including router management.
Analysts gave iVAD a big thumbs up, noting that existing frame relay WANs can generally be reworked faster to handle multimedia applications than pure IP-based VPNs can.
"Equant is ahead of the curve on this one," says Jeffrey Kagan, president of Kagan Telecom Associates in Atlanta. "When phone companies talk about their plans for their network of the future, they are describing what Equant already has in place with its global voice/data network."
"Although voice over IP will probably become dominant in the longer term, voice over frame relay will offer many cost benefits now," says Graham Finnie, research director at The Yankee Group in the U.K.
The iVAD service is available now in 41 countries, though not in all 75 countries in which Equant offers global frame relay services.
Recognizing that many countries with government-supported carriers are sensitive about alternative voice services, Huntley says Equant took a conservative approach and is only terminating iVAD voice traffic in countries that authorize voice competitors.
However, that includes most of the countries that signed last year's World Trade Organization agreement on telecom competition, which took effect last January. The group includes all of Western Europe, many Pacific Rim countries and a smattering of Latin American countries.
Easier to manage
GTE's new frame relay offerings may not be as leading edge as the others announced last week, but the services should prove useful to current frame relay customers.
The carrier introduced a frame relay monitoring service that gathers performance data about virtual circuits using smart DSUs/CSUs from Visual Networks called analysis service elements (ACE).
The ACEs also record traffic patterns to help network managers better plan the size of each frame relay virtual circuit in their networks.
GTE calls the service FrameWatch, and announced it along with SiteWatch, a service under which the company will monitor and manage network gear, including routers, hubs and switches.
FrameWatch costs $60 per month per site, and SiteWatch costs $100 to $350 per device.
Later this year, GTE will use ACE elements in a service that can monitor the performance of hybrid frame relay/ATM networks.
The service will track the quality of connections between corporate network sites that are connected to the WAN via a frame relay service and larger sites connected to the WAN by an ATM service.
Prices have not yet been determined.
MCI WorldCom: (800) 539-2000; Equant: (781) 221-7171; GTE: (800) 643-8399 |
