On Tue, 1 Jul 1997, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
This is not exactly true. Frame Relay -- if designed properly, and with good frame switches -- can be - IMHO - 10's of times better.
How? Does good frame relay switches accelerate photons or something?
Frame Relay allows yout he ability to psuedo-directly connection various pop's together, and gives that clean appearance of a 'no-hop' back bone. Why route when you can switch?
Yes, both frame relay and ATM give the "appearance" of a 'no-hop' backbone. Just because traceroute doesn't show the switch hop in the middle doesn't mean that they aren't there. So what is inherently better about that, unless you are into marketing vapours? I can see the argument that with current generation of rather deficient routers, switches have smaller per-hop latency, but even this is pretty silly since that difference is a noise lost in the cross continental/cross oceanic propagation delay. This should be a moot point any way with the impending introduction of real routers in to the networks. -dorian