THE INTERACTIVE NETWORK DESIGN MANUAL
Building a Frame Relay Network
The Major Advantages of Selecting Frame Relay
- Costs are not sensitive to location, as are leased lines.
- It supports higher bandwidth with less overhead and latency
than X.25.
- It is more widely available than Switched Multimegabit Data
Service (SMDS), and does not require costly, specialized data
service units (DSUs) for access links. Pay back is faster than
SMDS for small-to-moderate-sized networks that do not require
frequent connections in a fully meshed configuration.
- Changes may be made quickly. Most carriers can process requests
to increase port speed, committed information rate (CIR) and other
key parameters in a matter of hours.
- It supports a wide range of protocols via standard encapsulation
techniques (IETF RFC 1490, Data Link Switching).