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Frame Relay question

Hi, I work for a small company in Stamford Ct and we also have a small office in Vermont. Plans are to use Citrix to conect the users from vermont to the stamford office. My question is: What is a frame relay and how would that help or impact our current goals to connect the 2 offices. I am a network administrator and have good knowlede of networks but I have never dealt with frame relays and out internet service provider sugested this to us. Also what are the costs associated with this.
Thanks in advance!
Chris

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Scotty_cisco

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RoyalEF

Athila, two major reasons for adopting frame relay vs standard point-to-point lines is cost and complexity.

If I buy a circuit from stamford to vermont, i pay by the mile and the circuit is all mine-to use and to pay for. With frame relay you would pay for two local loop circuits: one from Stamford to your carriers nearest location, and another from your Vermont location to the carriers nearest Vermont location. These loops are much shorter than the long haul between the two cities and may be economical (the greater the distance the more this is true). Like Scott said, your carrier also doesn't charge you full price of the bandwidth. You may have a 256k fractional T1 at each location but only 128K CIR. You pay and configure it to match your needs.

Frame relay will also allow me to have a single t1 (one port on one piece of equipment) with multiple virtual circuits to different locations. This is great when you have a dozen offices connected to a main office. You could setup a dozen circuits and a dozen lines coming in, a dozen ports. Frame relay easily provides consolidation of all onto a single circuit. The home office has one circuit and within that circuit are a dozen streams that logically spread out throug the carrier's Frame Relay cloud to reach all the different offices.

The quality of the network is always an issue. A poorly maintained or quickly expanding network will suffer congestion and your throughput and performance will suffer. Check if your contract has guarantees of performance and uptime. If this is critical to your company you may need a contractual clause to get refunds from the carrier on poor performing links and outages.

Royal