Bundling the possibilities

New and developing technologies are enticing, but service providers must choose which, if any, to implement in their highly guarded networks. One new technology, multilink frame relay, was adopted as specification FRF.16 last September by the Frame Relay Forum and may win service providers' hearts.

Multilink frame relay offers flexibility and the ability to deliver high bandwidth at reduced costs, two sweet spots for service providers. The primary attraction is its ability to provide broadband Internet access speeds above T-1 levels at an affordable price.

The technology essentially groups links to create a multilink bundle, causing the bundle to look like a single physical interface to the data link layer.

"The bundle looks like one big pipe," said Larry Kraft, vice president of marketing at Advanced Switching Communications. "But if one link goes down, the others still operate."

The frames are positioned throughout the bundled links, and data is reconfigured to the same order in which it was sent. With multilink frame relay, the ability to adapt to network conditions is handled by a set of control messages, which stipulate the MFR link integrity protocol. That, in turn, is intended to enable service providers to dynamically add and subtract links to the bundle.

ASC has completed interoperability tests with its RBOX broadband services access platform and Larscom's iPLEX 6000 IP and frame-aware multilink access equipment.

"[Multilink frame relay] gives service providers options they never had before," said Peter Prichard, director of marketing for Larscom.

Worldwide market demand for frame relay service is expected to reach $14 billion in 2002, compared with $6 billion in 1998, according to Vertical Systems Group research. Therefore, service providers always are looking to optimize offerings, he said.

Before multilink frame relay, users had to buy expensive T-3s or use proprietary fractional T-3 implementations or ATM for bandwidth-exhaustive network areas, Prichard said.

But despite multilink frame relay's bonuses, it has not secured a spot in service provider networks yet because the equipment has not met necessary maturity and interoperability levels, said Rosemary Cochran, principal and founder of Vertical Systems Group. "The other issue is where this fits," she said. Multilink frame relay is designed to be a standardized approach above T-1 levels, and frame relay T-3 connections comprise a very small part of the market.

"From a requirement standpoint, certainly the demand is there, but timing is going to be a factor in terms of implementation," Cochran said. In addition to limited equipment availability, other barriers to adoption are existing networks and alternative technologies, she said. Still, there is room to grow.

"What the other options [to multilink frame relay] are not accomplishing are incremental speeds between T-1 and T-3," she said.

Stepping into existing service provider networks could prove problematic. Multilink frame relay likely will be an adjunct to service providers' existing operations. "The trick is to produce the product [and] perform the interoperability tests with the companies that are installed already," Cochran said.

AT&T and MCI WorldCom, which control the greatest portions of the frame relay market, had no comment on the multilink frame relay technology, perhaps gun shy because each has suffered frame relay outages.