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).