bruce@camb.com (Barton F. Bruce) (04/07/91)
At last! there is now a signigicant and different way to connect ALL
your company's scattered LANs into a big WAN.
Frame relay is here and you can order it. Some thought Sprint would be first
later this year, but WilTel has been beta testing it with some LARGE
customers, and has now announced its general availability.
The actual switches are not yet in all their POPs, but they will bear the
expense of back-hauling your access lines from a switch to the POP near
you.
What is Frame relay? Think of a FAST efficient and cheap (and no packet
charges) x.25 network. Your sites will all be part of a CUG (closed Users Group)
so, though you are on a public net, you traffic is on your virtual private net.
You need Enet routers that can handle frame relay. cisco's CAN today.
You need an approved T1 CSU (Datalink's is today). You get to use the
rest of the T1's DS0s for any other leased line type access they can sell you,
since you won't be using all of it for frame relay.
Note well that this is distance insensitive, and look at the pricing!
They are offering 2 'port connection' speeds - 256 kbps, and 1024 mbps.
These are obviously 4 and 16 DS0s out of the T1 access pipe. The approved
CSUs let you gain access to the other DS0s on a seperate port.
Their service is provided in PVCs (Permanent Virtual Circuits) between
your sites. These PVC have a nominal speed, BUT can support bursts
up to the Port Connection speed. The idea here is that you are
paying for some average amount of transport, but can get peaks
that will be carried. Many companies buy leased lines that vastly
exceed their average load just to cater to the bursty needs of their
WAN. This *may* solve some of these problems at lower cost.
The 'Port Connection' (the ONE physical connection to your cisco
box ) supports various lower speed PVCs to many remote sites. Each
nominal PVC speed is also some number of DS0s (64 kb - 1 T1 time slot)
of bandwidth. I am making a N x DS0 column below, because that number
does figure into pricing.
Port Connection PVC speed N x DS0
256 Kbps 56/64 Kbps 1
128 Kbps 2
1.024 Mbps 56/64 Kbps 1
128 Kbps 2
256 4
512 8
This is per site pricing, NO local access lines, etc included. It is based
on the Port Connection speed, and the total of N x DS0s of PVC bandwidth
terminating there. N.B. that you need not subscribe to PVCs between
all possible nodes, and that, depending on traffic, you may implement
anything between a simple star to a full mesh topology. Each PVC can
be whatever speed is needed.
Port Connection Size: 256 K 1.024 Mbps
----- ----------
total DS0s of PVCs $ $
1 635 1535
2 920 1820
3 1062 2105
4 1176 2390
5 1262 2675
6 1347 2960
7 1404 3245
8 1461 3530
As an example, 3 nodes A, B, C with A being the central site with very
little traffic between B and C could all use 256 K Ports, and A would use
2 64k PVCs ($920), and the 2 other sites would only have a 64k PVC to A
for $635 each or total for all 3 sites of $2190. If there needed to be a
PVC between B and C, each site would pay $920 for $2760 total.
If your sites are Boston, NYC, and Albany, these prices are terrible
compared to leased 64kb DDS-II lines, but with greater distances,
many more PVCs, and enjoying the benefits of the burst capability, this
sort of offering could look very attractive. Remember also that each
site ONLY needs one high speed serial port into their cisco, not one
for each remote served by a PVC. This is a big savings in cisco hardware.
This is based on my phone notes after talking to a WilTel sales critter,
and could easily contain many errors, but does give some feel for the
offering. I think this was officially announced last Monday. Friday I let my
Sprint saleswoman go on in detail about how they were going to be first with
frame relay much later this year. I then told her about WilTel...
usual disclaimers: I have NO $ connections to any above companies (not even
as a customer - yet). This is just good stuff we all will need to know soon.
WilTel is at 1.800.642.2299 - tell them the price is still too high.jwc@Solbourne.COM (Jeff Christy) (04/11/91)
>Frame relay is here and you can order it. Some thought Sprint would be first >later this year, but WilTel has been beta testing it with some LARGE >customers, and has now announced its general availability. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that Frame Relay is still UNavailable from any of the RBOCs. Therefore, you still have to lease a T1 to get from your site to the Sprint or WilTel POP. Can anyone dispute this? Come on USWest...