InformationWeek

August 4, 1997

Sprint Enhances Frame Relay Service s

Tiered offerings for SNA, LAN traffic come with new service-level guarantees

By Teri Robinson

print is rolling out frame relay services tailored for SNA and LAN environments and backed by enhanced service-level guarantees. Despite the popularity of frame relay services, Sprint maintains, users haven't gotten the kind of reliability assurances they get with private-line services.

Sprint's Frame Relay for SNA is aimed at users who currently run critical applications such as credit-card transactions over private-line networks. The carrier's Frame Relay for LANs is aimed at client-server implementations that accommodate a variety of business applications.

For both services, Sprint promises throughput of up to 1.022 Mbps, 99.9% guaranteed data d elivery, and end-to-end network availability of 99.5%. The main difference between the SNA and LAN services is in priority and response-time delay. Delay-sensitive SNA traffic is given top priority and is guaranteed a response-time delay of no more than 50 milliseconds; LAN traffic is given normal priority and a response-time delay of 65 milliseconds.

John Matthews, telecommunications manager at Adobe Systems Inc. in San Jose, Calif., says the Sprint service is promising, but he adds, "Like with all the services these guys offer, what are they going to charge you?"

The SNA frame relay services are priced at a premium. For example, for a 1.024-Mbps private virtual circuit for SNA traffic, Sprint will charge $3,860. A comparable PVC for LAN connectivity traffic is priced at $2,490.

Until now, companies that use IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture) haven't had much incentive to move away from their private-line networks, says Johna Till Johnson, an analyst in New York with the Meta Group. "They generally have a separate infrastructure for LANs and SNA, which is not very cost-effective," she says, especially if those companies are looking to move to IP-based networks.

Sprint says it plans to offer a similar frame relay service for voice in the first quarter of 1998.

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