Frame Relay predates ATM and is widely used for carrying a mixture of traffic types, including packet- and circuit-switched data, to customer sites and within WANs. This report discusses Frame Relay’s Quality of Service (QoS) with Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC), Committed Information Rate (CIR) and Switched Virtual Circuits (SVC). Frame Relay’s generally higher efficiency than ATM is discussed in the context of the move towards MPLS and TCP/IP backbone networks.
