In a push to bring Frame Relay products to the small office and home office environment, Motorola Information Systems Group’s Mansfield, Massachusetts-based Network Systems Division has announced a joint product development and marketing agreement with Westford, Massachusetts-headquartered Cascade Communications Corp. The comopanies say they will work together to provide low cost switched access to Frame Relay services for Internet users, telecommuters and home-based workers. Under the deal, Motorola and Cascade will jointly develop ISDN and public switched telephone network dial-up access to Frame Relay services through the former’s Vanguard Frame Relay Access devices and Cascade’s B-STDX family of Multiservice wide area network switches for Frame Relay service providers. Initially, both companies say they will support Permanent Virtual Circuit access to Frame Relay over telephone company dial-up and ISDN lines by the middle of this year, followed at an unspecified time by Switched Virtual Circuit support. Additionally, the companies plan to jointly market their respective Frame Relay offerings to business customers and service providers. They have also undertaken to work together over time to extend Frame Relay access technology, although no details of how and when they intend to do so have been released.
