David Horton and I had a conversation with Henry Hughes, as a
consult for a telco Frame Relay operation.
The purpose for this consult was
to identify a telco's practice of provisioning and management of Frame Relay
networks and services. Henry was helpful in identifying operations of GTE FR
provisioning, configuration, management of equipment and cross connection
information.
Henry had received and responded to a short write-up describing
our background and purpose. His background had been in setting up customer
connections to a CO and working in the connections of the hierarchy of
connections between RBOCs and National providers. He responded to questions in
conversation with David and myself.
He described:
- Several scenarios of connections and specifics for
interface, port and circuits.
- The application of FR layer 2 addressing in a complex
local, regional, and national scope.
- The added complexity of multiple vendor equipment in
classes of COs. (from local to tandem to regional switches).
- The manual processes used to manage configuration of
circuits, links, trunks, and both replacement and expansion hardware. And
the challenges to customer service these present.
Also, with his 30 years of experience, the processes and
practices of telco operations were not up-to-speed with modern communications
technology and required sometimes urgent-response that is expensive to perform,
and risks extended outages.
I believe this discussion validates that
ConnectionManager and FrameConnect architecture are sound, and of high
value.
I would like to review notes with David and will be following up
with Henry today.
Mike Schweitzer
Product Solutions Architect
Denver303.486.5986