Where Performance and Value Converge

The reason you might be reading this is because you clicked on the Sprint Frame Relay brochure displayed on the samples page of my website. A nice advantage of a blog is that it lets me provide "offline" commentary to my writing samples. It's all text -- and text about text can quickly become confusing if there is no clear way to separate the commentary from the sample.

So what about the frame relay brochure?


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First, some background. For those of you who don't know, frame relay is a way to send data that in some ways is like a conventional telephone circuit -- it relies on a physical point-to-point connection. That's different from an "Internet style" IP circuit where anyone can talk to anyone else without setting up a dedicated link first. Sprint's goal is to offer a frame relay service over its regular IP backbone. That will boost performance; customers get to keep their legacy frame relay equipment; and Sprint saves money because it no longer has to invest in a dedicated frame relay infrastructure. It can simply route frame relay traffic over the same network it routes all its traffic.

It's a little bit of technology slight-of-hand. But it's also a little bit of writing slight-of-hand too.

What I like about this brochure is that it tells a good story without getting bogged down in details like the fact that this is no longer a real frame relay network, but simply an IP network that "speaks frame relay." I also like the play on the word "converge." Just as network technologies are coming together, so are the key selling propositions those technologies traditionally stand for. It's a little bit of technology slight-of-hand. But it's also a little bit of writing slight-of-hand too.