Thus spake "Gyorfy, Shawn" <sgyorfy@elinkny.com>
Since the topic exploded, what are your opinions on encapsulation of leased line DS3s. We currently use Frame Relay for out Point to Point DS3 connections. Personally, I don't know why we use FR as our encapsulation, and so the question to all. If you are running Cisco to Cisco, would it be wise to run HDLC or PPP? Our DS3s' here are hardly maxed out, 15% or so, so I'm not complaining about the few extra bits I can squeeze out them but maybe that 15% can shrink to 10% with less overhead. Opinions or examples of life appreciated.
As you're finding out, this is largely a religious issue. There are no significant differences in overhead between HDLC, PPP, and FR. Any performance difference can be more easily attributed to vendor implementation than to protocol efficiency. In practice, HDLC is the dominant encapsulation, primarily since it's Cisco's default. If for no other reason, you should use HDLC because almost everyone expects you to be using it. PPP is obviously present in non-Cisco shops, and anywhere MLPPP or LFI is needed. FR is only used as a p-t-p encapsulation in certain cases that require it; almost nobody uses it without a good reason. S