North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Multi-link Frame Relay OR Load Balancing

  • From: Jeff Kell
  • Date: Thu Sep 16 22:57:39 2004

Scott McGrath wrote:

In my experience the breakeven point for a Frame Relay DS3 is 6 DS1
circuits. DS3's tend to be more reliable than DS1's as the ILEC usually
installs a MUX at your site instead of running to the nearest channel bank
and running the T1's over copper with a few repeaters thrown in for
good measure.


I'll second that. Our ILEC extended our existing SONET node (for the PBX in another building) to our machine room (couldn't push DS3 over copper that far). Now, if they'd just terminate the old T1s at the new node and not push them over local copper from there to the machine room, we would be sitting pretty.

Another nice thing about DS3's is that it is easy to scale bandwidth in
the future by modifying the CIR on your link. Another feature is that
since the link is faster the serialization delay is lower which will give
you better latency and last but not least PA3+ for Cisco 7[2|5]xx routers
are inexpensive and give you one call for service not a separate call for
the CSU/DSU's and the serial line card you need to support a multilink
solution.


Ditto. We have one in a 7204 with a CIR of 30Mb. Handles it quite nicely, replaced 5 T1s on load-sharing per-packet link.

Jeff