Saving with Frame Relay

Senior vice president Kevin O'Donnell helped launch voice over frame relay at Florida food distributor Bonacker & Leigh in 1994. The company sought to cut hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual long-distance charges for communications among its Miami headquarters and five remote offices.

The company's existing network had slow 9.6-Kbps dedicated leased lines with multiplexers for sending data from Miami to each subsidiary. A separate voice ne twork was strung together with tie lines and inbound and outbound 800 numbers.

After spending about $130,000 for ACTnet equipment, the company consolidated data and voice networks into one 56-Kbps frame-relay link. A multiplexer connects a frame-relay switch located at the Miami headquarters with a Unix machine and the office's LAN, PBX, and fax machines. Multiplexers now turn voice, fax, and data into frame-relay packets. The switch then addresses the packets and launches them into a public frame-relay network (here, Intermedia Communications). Multiplexers at each remote office open the packets and send the data to the appropriate phone line, fax machine, or PC.

Because Bonacker & Leigh chose to install its own switches and multiplexers (rather than renting Intermedia's), it needed only the "raw" pipe into a frame-relay cloud. This cost about $40,000 a year -- versus the annual $180,000 charges the company had been paying for the slower, parallel-network implementation, O'Donnell says.