Unlike many local competitors focusing on serving the small to midsized business market, Focal isn't trying to create an all-encompassing service bundle, Taylor says. We're expanding our geography this year, rolling out our own DSL service and expanding our private line service over our own fiber. It works well for the incumbents because it basically doubles their lines. One area into which CLECs are moving more aggressively is frame relay services. Adding frame relay to their portfolios enables local competitors to move beyond pure Net access as a data service, Copper Mountain's Higgins says.
Frame relay is a reliable means of connecting remote locations to the headquarters office.
Because of the committed information rate and service-level agreements associated with frame relay, it is a great way to offer companies the reliability they expect from a data service. Tying it all together For the newer generation of CLECs known as integrated communications providers, there is less interest in legacy services and more focus on getting the maximum potential from integrating all services onto a single data network backbone. Customers connect their separate voice and data networks into integrated access devices that then connect to a DSL Access Multiplexer. Voice traffic is routed through the voice gateway and into a circuit switch of the CLEC, a CLEC partner or even an incumbent, via a standard GR-303 switch interface. Data traffic remains on the packet network, which is either an Asynchronous Transfer Mode or Internet Protocol network.