Frame relay was aimed to make more efficient use of the previous existing physical resources, which allowed for the under provisioning of data services by telecommunications companies (telcos) to their business customers. A number of years ago, clients were unlikely to be utilizing a data service 100 percent of the time. In more recent years, frame relay has been used less and less and replaced with Multi-Protocol Label Switching - MPLS .

Bandwidth providers/Network providers such as AT&T, Verizon Business, Sprint, Qwest, Paetec, Global Crossing, just to name a few, have now migrated to MPLS and most no longer offer frame relay as a solution.

AT&T was as of June 2007, the largest frame relay service provider in the United States, with local networks in 22 states, plus national and international networks. This number is expected to change between 2007 and 2009 when most of these frame relay contracts expire and businesses migrate to MPLS. Many customers have migrated from frame relay to MPLS over IP or Ethernet, which in many cases have reduced costs and improved manageability and performance of their wide area networks.

Customers from all network providers are expected to migrate to MPLS whether they are with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Qwest, Paetec, Level3, or any other providers. Frame relay service will be used less and less as MPLS service is a more cost effective solution and provide the businesses with more bandwidth overall at less cost.

MPLS Benefits

MPLS has a number of benefits including Class of Service (COS). With MPLS you can prioritize the data flow on your network and ensure the most critical data traverses the network reliably and expeditiously in congested situations. A prime candidate for priority one in a MPLS network would be VoIP, as voice traffic cannot tolerate the jitter and delay when a network becomes congested.

In an MPLS network, VoIP traffic can take precedence over any other traffic therein eliminating potential jitter and delay. Another example would be a customer facing point-of-sale (POS) application. One would not want a customer standing at the checkout counter to be inconvenienced by a transaction being held up due to a busy network. Providing a high priority class of service (Cos) in a MPLS circuit would generally prevent this from happening.

Disaster Recovery

The most important benefit MPLS network brings to the table is the any-to-any connectivity for all points on the network. If the field office in Los Angeles has traffic destined for the Dallas office, for example, that traffic would go directly to Dallas versus going to the headquarters location (New York) and then back to Dallas as it would in a traditional hub-and-spoke network (frame relay connection).

The any-to-any traffic routing capability in and of itself creates another benefit, disaster recovery. In an MPLS network, traffic can be easily diverted to any other location on the network in the event a particular network node becomes unavailable. Of course there has to be a host available at the other selected node, but that comes with disaster recovery planning.

Let’s say you have a host computer at the New York headquarters; you may decide to mirror data to a redundant system in the Chicago office. With this type of architecture, if you should lose the New York office, your transactions would automatically reroute to Chicago making the New York failure totally transparent to the remainder of the network locations.

To determine if MPLS solution is for you and if the MPLS cost makes sense for your organization, you need to sit down and determine what type of data your network is transporting today as well as the origin and destination of the data. In addition, you need to be able to envision how the network will be like in the next few years. Remember about the VOIP or videoconferencing, as depending on how the VOIP is implemented, MPLS connections can prove to be a huge enabler.

If you have a traditional hub and spoke network such as a frame relay network, your assessment results determines the destination for all data is from the remote offices to the hub router site at headquarters, the value of MPLS diminishes significantly. On the other hand, if you determine there is a significant volume of traffic that originates, and is destined to, numerous points on the network then you need to take a hard look at MPLS connections as they will allow for a fully meshed network.

The Decisive Factors: Time and Effort

The resources required and time to migrate to MPLS network as well as the ROI will no doubt be factors in your decision process in whether or not you choose MPLS. Over the course of the next couple of years we expect the carriers will make the migration less painful and more economical than it is currently. So if you have ruled out MPLS for now, we suspect you may revisit the technology within the next couple of years.

If you'd like assistance in considering migrating frame relay to MPLS or looking at different options for MPLS pricing, please click on the link get MPLS quotes.