Frame Relay

Wide area network technology A basic Frame Relay network Frame Relay (FR) is a standardized wide area network (WAN) technology that specifies the physical and data link layers of digital telecommunications channels using a packet switching methodology. Frame Relay was originally developed as a simplified version of the X.25 system designed to be carried over the emerging Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) networks. X.25 had been designed to operate over normal telephone lines that were subject to noise that would result in lost data, and the protocol featured extensive error correction to address this. ISDN offered dramatically lower error rates, in effect zero, and the extensive error correction overhead was no longer needed. The new protocol suite was essentially a cut-down X.25 with no error correction, leading to lower overhead, better channel efficiency, and often significantly overall higher performance than X.25. Like X.25, Frame Relay is normally used in a circuit switched layout, where connections between two endpoints are long-term (in computer terms at least). This matches the normal use of the telephone network, which X.25 was designed to run on top of. This con