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In the half-decade since the Frame Relay Forum started, its namesake technology has skyrocketed in popularity to a $2 billion-a-year revenue generator. Keeping pace with the technology, the Forum has issued about a dozen implementation agreements on ways to offer and interwork frame relay services.

"Frame relay is a relatively simple technology, and consequently, the number of implementation agreements needed for frame relay is manageable," said Steve Taylor, president of Distributed Networking Associates, Greensboro, N.C. "The Frame Relay Forum does a good job of getting agreements out. It tends to be very responsive and also tends to limit the scope of its activities."

So where does the Forum go next? Voice-over-frame relay and asynchronous transfer mode-to-frame relay over switched virtual circuits (SVCs) are probably the two most pressing issues in frame relay today, said Forum President Andrew Greenfield, who is also director of service provider marketing for Cisco StrataCom.

"The hottest topic right now is voice-over-frame relay," he said. "The vendor community is definitely very excited about it, and users are excited about the potential cost savings."

A recent survey of 400 frame relay users by Vertical Systems Group, Dedham, Mass., confirms Greenfield's assessment.

In May, 24% of users said voice-over-frame relay is important. What's even more significant, said Vertical Systems analyst Erin Dunne, is that the 1994 version of the study showed that only 6% of users thought voice-over-frame relay was important.

Voice-over-frame relay may not be toll quality, but customers are willing to forsake a little quality to save money. For remote office and international use, the price points are seductive. With an inexpensive frame relay access device costing about $4000, buyers can recoup capital costs within a few months with "free" phone calls between the main office and remote or international locations, Dunne said.

"Voice is not going to be the driving application, but as icing on the cake for international and remote office users, it's a wonderful application," Dunne said.

The Frame Relay Forum's job in the voice arena is twofold. First, the group will define how voice traffic should be carried over frame relay, considering the wide range of voice compression algorithms available.

The second task is a bit harder. The Forum will try to find a negotiating mechanism so that two frame relay devices can talk to each other.

The Forum plans to have an implementation agreement for voice-over-frame relay developed by the end of the year, Greenfield said.

Frame relay-over-ATM via SVCs, although a hot secondary topic, will probably have to wait a while longer. The Forum is gathering comments on SVCs, Greenfield said. Frame relay-to-ATM using permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) is just now being deployed, so SVCs will be added as an update to the PVC implementation agreement.

As Taylor said, "Eventually, we'll use SVCs for both frame relay and ATM, so we'll need an interworking agreement because they use different call setup procedures. That's maybe a couple of years away. Not having the [SVC] agreement is not slowing anybody down at this point."