Frame Relay T1 FAQ
Q: Should I Get a Frame Relay T1?
Most of our customers find a regular point to point T1 best fills their needs. In certain circumstances, however, Frame Relay can be a great solution. If your office is far from common infrastructure or fiber optic plant installs, such as is the case in many outlying areas, Frame Relay provides virtually the same speed and reliability of a point to point T1 without many of the mileage restrictions.
Frame Relay can often use the same infrastructure and equipment as a point to point T1 so changing from one service to the other is very easy and can have almost zero cost.
Q: What If My Frame Relay T1 Goes Down?
The most common cause for a T1 to go down is either a power outage or line disruption. Check first that your T1 router and CSU are powered up and not showing errors. Many routers can tell you about the status of the T1 line and any problems it is experiencing. Check the cabling for the T1 line to make sure it has not been damaged or disturbed. Make sure all connections are tight.
If the customer premises equipment is working fine, please call Fibernet Technical Support for help. We can check the connection from our end and determine if the line provider (Qwest, ELI, XO, etc.) needs to start a repair ticket.
If the line provider opens a repair ticket they will expedite the repair as much as possible and since you pay them for the leased line service, they may also issue a credit for the downtime if you ask for it. If Fibernet is handling the call to the line provider, you will need to get the repair ticket number for the line provider from us in order to get a credit from the line provider.
If Fibernet is experiencing an outage due to maintenance we will have endeavored to notify you in advance. If you were not notified it is most likely because you are not signed up on our notification list. Please login to our customer back room at www.fiber.net and subscribe to the notification list for your service account type.
If Fibernet is experiencing an unscheduled outage due to a network issue, we will follow up with you once service is restored or once we have an ETA for repairs to be completed.
Q: What If My Frame Relay T1 Seems Slow?
The first thing you should check is your traffic graph in the customer back room at www.fiber.net It will show you your current 5 minute average transfer. If it is unusually high, that can indicate possible virus or malware activity on your network or a user abusing your connection (downloading movies etc.).
If your usage seems depressed on the graph, this can still be caused by virus activity but it can be of a type that is hard to see from outside the network. We can come to your office and perform a network traffic scan to determine the nature of the traffic that is causing problems. Just call our sales and service office to arrange this service.
It is possible that your line is experiencing transient errors or packet loss due to CRC errors on the line. This can be seen in the router interface for your end of the connection. We can determine this for you if you provide us authentication access to your router. This is usually fixed by opening a repair ticket with the line provider.
