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August 16, 1999 Frame Relay Breakdown
Frame Relay Breakdown
By Brian Riggs
"We are just limping along," says Brian Spears, director of information services at Konica USA
Inc., a distributor of business machines. The Windsor, Conn., company uses MCI WorldCom's frame
relay for E-mail, database access, and other services to its 50 branch offices.
MCI WorldCom says it has not determined the cause of the outage, which it says occurred
following a scheduled upgrade to Lucent switch software. MCI Worldcom estimates the problems
have affected as many as 30% of its frame relay customers since engineers first noticed
unusually high network congestion Aug. 5. The outages are no longer spreading to additional
customers, according to an MCI WorldCom spokeswoman.
That's little consolation to companies dependent on MCI WorldCom services to interconnect their
offices and help conduct their business. "We have branches that have been off the network for
days," says Konica's Spears. He says orders from many branches are being manually entered into
ordering systems.
"This sort of thing is bound to happen given the complexity of WAN communications today," says
Virginia Brooks, VP of networking and telecommunications at the Aberdeen Group.
Analysts say companies should not depend solely on one network from one service provider and
should have backup strategies in place. Says Brooks, "If connectivity and uptime are critical to
your business, you have to aggressively invest in contingency plans."
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ustomers of MCI WorldCom's frame relay network service last week suffered severe problems,
apparently caused by problems associated with upgrades to the Lucent Technologies equipment
and software on which the network is based. At press time, many customers were still waiting
for their data communications service to be reestablished after nearly a week of partial to
complete downtime.