FRAME RELAY YOU CAN AFFORD

In the Chinese culture, 2002 is the year of the horse. In telecom, it's the year of cost cutting. And some companies are employing rather extreme measures toward achieving their goals (see story on page 10).

But cost cutting often creates as many problems as it solves for carriers, faced with the paradox of maintaining a competitive edge and satisfying ever-more-demanding customers — who have their own cost-cutting crises — despite diminished resources.

OpenReach recently introduced a product designed in large measure to address this paradox. It is the Frame Relay Plus, a series of applications suites that can be deployed to any frame relay network to increase bandwidth (as much as tenfold) and security, improve reliability and extend geographic coverage.

Mark Tuomenoksa, founder and chairman of the board for OpenReach, said Frame Relay Plus is the next generation of the company's Mainstream application suite. The suite was designed to replace existing frame relay networks; in today's climate, that's just not going to fly.

“In this economy, we knew we had to come up with something that would work with what's already there,” Tuomenoksa said.

The suite consists of the FrameFlow bandwidth enhancer, which automatically shifts high-bandwidth traffic to the enterprise's VPN; the FrameAid always-on frame relay backup system; and FrameGuard, which protects the local network with a built-in firewall and “strong” encryption, Tuomenoksa said.

“If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail,” he said. But Frame Relay Plus “gives enterprises a full tool kit” because it can be applied wherever it's needed.
— Glenn Bischoff
www.openreach.com