Frame relay farewell tour #3 under way

Like a band that keeps announcing its retirement, traditional frame relay keeps waving good-bye but likes to stick around for another bow.

Recently Verizon Business quietly made a change in the availability of its frame relay service. The carrier stuck a notation in its Service Guide that if you are not a current frame relay customer of theirs, you can no longer order the service. And Verizon's frame relay pricing was moved to the Non-Current products section of its Service Guide.

Verizon's move is reminiscent of a move away from frame relay by Sprint a couple of years ago. Well, sort of. Sprint actually pushed away considerably harder from the frame relay table. It started putting clauses in contracts saying that it had the right to move existing customers off its legacy frame relay network past a date certain, even in the middle of an ongoing contract.

Verizon isn't saying that, and by all readings of the new policy, a Verizon customer could still engage in a contractually obligated mid-contract rate review for frame relay, or even exercise renewal options for an enterprise voice/data service contract that included frame relay.

But the true measure of any telecom service is in the marketplace, and this is where the story will really play out. Lack of new orders -- whether because of official policy or simply lack of demand from customers migrating carriers, who are obviously buying primarily MPLS -- can undercut the rate of decline of pricing for any given service.

Now of course, you wouldn't actually order pricing out of the Service Guide. So Verizon's moving some prices into the equivalent of the Service Guide junk heap isn't the precise threat.

The real threat is that you'll continue to pay your existing rates for frame relay, or maybe achieve a minimal reduction, while all your friends (and your vertical-industry enemies) are paying lower rates for a more up-to-date service. You could reasonably expect Verizon not to to offer too good a deal on existing frame business if they are trying to entice customers away from frame in favor of Private IP Service -- their MPLS service.

In a way, Verizon's move isn't all that surprising and the timing not particularly alarming. It actually makes some sense that Verizon's first flickering wave away from frame relay would be less definitive than Sprint's, and it would also make sense that AT&T's move, if and when it comes, will be more tentative still. As in past generations of voice and data technology, AT&T still has a large base of legacy users, including very important brand-name enterprises, to manage along the transition curve, and would typically take years to keep saying farewell.

And it bears noting that in all of this we're talking about traditional frame relay as a native service, not every manifestation of the frame relay technology on the network edge. Frame relay as an interface into the IP/MPLS network clouds of major carriers probably still has a considerable life ahead of it, in its various guises as "indirect access" or "ePVCs" or "IP-enabled frame relay." Straight-up comparisons of costs and bids are always called for, especially for those enterprises that never have seen a use for MPLS service's any-to-any connectivity feature.

But a fully competitive RFP for frame relay, or frame-to-ATM interworking service? That's probably no longer in the cards. Sure, a Verizon frame relay customer could try to entice AT&T into a head-to-head competition on frame, since Verizon isn't cutting off existing frame relay customers. But AT&T (just like Verizon!) is also most likely to respond with a set of pricing offers that makes you actually want to go to AVPN -- one of AT&T's MPLS services.

As a matter of fact, competitive procurements seem to work best when they combine the threat of moving carriers and moving technology at the same time. That's one reason why well-crafted MPLS RFPs have been so beneficial to many enterprises. For frame relay, if you're still a big fan, you can catch the farewell concert -- and maybe the next farewell concert -- but keep in mind that the thrill won't last forever.