London-based consultancy Ovum Ltd predicts that revenues from European Frame Relay services will grow to $960m in 1998 from $12m last year. The forecasts are published in its information service on value-added network services, VANS Markets Europe. The strong growth pattern is attributed to increasing demand for applications requiring bandwidth of between 128Kbps and 2Mbps. While Ovum feels that Asynchronous Transfer Mode services will eventually take over from Frame Relay, it believes that these services will not start to take off until towards the end of the decade. The consultancy’s reasoning is that Asynchronous Transfer Mode is perceived to be most suitable for much higher speeds than Frame Relay, and Ovum feels that in the short term there will not be much demand for these. Similarly, Switched Multimegabit Data Service is not expected to have too much impact on the Frame Relay market, as carriers’ deployment plans for this technology are predominantly concentrated on the larger conurbations, whereas Frame Relay is expected to be more widely deployed. Ovum’s VANs Markets Europe service costs $3,325 for an annual subscription.
