What does Frame Relay do?
Frame Relay is a shared service offered by telecommunications companies. Frame relay has been widely available since the early 1990s. It shares some similarities with X.25, but offers increased speed and less functionality – as X.25 was meant to operate mostly with slow, “character at a time” asynchronous terminals (VT100s, Decwriters, early PCs, etc). Frame Relay is normally used to operate a Wide Area Network (WAN) without your company having to do the network management functions. Frame Relay is -not- an Internet protocol, although it is possible to route Frame Relay traffic to a TCP/IP internet gateway. Like X.25, there are two basic types of connections, Switched Virtual Circuits (SVCs) and Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC). An SVC is a connection made on demand between a terminal, PC or computer to another resource on the network. A PVC is always active between two computers, similar to a leased line – but without a need for a dedicated leased circuit to each end-point on the WAN.
