The latest company to eschew running Frame Relay protocols between network switches is Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Telematic International Inc. The Frame Relay service does not guarantee delivery of data, and packets are lost if the network becomes over-congested. Telematics’ new approach is to run the proprietary Telematics Network Protocol – TNP – between switches, while presenting a standard Frame Relay interface to the user – not entirely standard however, since the use of the proprietary protocol within the network cloud provides guaranteed data delivery. Putting error correction and congestion control within the network may seem odd – after all, the received wisdom is that it is the very lack of this overhead at the switches that enables Frame Relay to run so fast. Not so, according to UK marketing manager Malcolm Duckett, who argues that the bottlenecks lie not in switching speed, but with buffering and interrupt-handling. Moreover, he says, relying on end nodes for error correction is particularly slow, since re-send requests have to pass from one side of the network to the other, rather than just having the network sort it out. Software upgrades to existing Telematics switches cost #3,480 for the first licence and #1,390 for subsequent copies. Meanwhile, the company has also launched its new graphical wide area network management system, SmartView UXG. The software runs under Unix with the OSF/Motif graphical user interface.
