InformationWeek

October 20, 1997

Bandwidth On Demand

MCI's frame relay SVCs let customers pay only for the dat a capacity they need

CI has become the first carrier to add true bandwidth-on-demand capabilities to its frame relay service, announcing switched virtual circuits (SVCs) in speeds ranging from 16 Kbps to 6 Mbps.

The service lets customers establish nearly instant temporary frame relay connections to the MCI network. SVC links can be activated and deactivated as a company's needs change, giving it the flexibility to alter connections and bandwidth between sites.

"We've been waiting for this for a long time," says Terry Hutchens, manager of network engineering at the Lynchburg, Va., office of Framatome Technologies Inc., which does testing for the nuclear industry. To perform that testing, Framatome now secures permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) t o its customers' networks, then gathers data over the networks.

Those connections, however, take longer to set up than SVCs. "A lot of times customers don't decide they want us to do this work until the last minute," Hutchens says. "This would free up a lot of the long lead times that we run into."

PVCs, offered by MCI and other long-distance carriers, require users to allocate frame relay network ports to specific applications. "Before, customers would have to design their frame relay networks just like private-line networks," says Ray Kang, MCI director of broadband marketing. "This gets rid of the one-size-fits-all frame relay network."

Some analysts say SVCs will appeal to companies with very "flat" networks, where a lot of sites are connected together. SVCs are also well suited for applications that demand high bandwidth for short periods of time, such as disaster recovery and video.

But Rick Malone, an analyst with Vertical Systems Group in Dedham, Mass., argues that most network managers comi ng from the IBM Systems Network Architecture environment are used to having a lot of control over their networks. They lose that control moving from PVCs to SVCs, he says.

MCI's SVC service will be available in December, priced according to usage. AT&T has introduced SVCs for its ATM service, but neither AT&T nor Sprint has announced plans for frame relay SVCs.

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