Frame Relay was horrible, and the bane of our existence at the ISP.
We had a wide variety of customer connections, from dialup to an honest-to-God 14.4Kbps digital leased line, to 56K and T-1 leased lines and some T-3s in our backbone.
Our manager was a huge proponent of SMDS; in fact the SMDS diagrams made liberal use of the "cloud" icon to depict connections going in and out of the telco's switched network. He was able to derive great reliability and value from SMDS connections, and they were probably our fastest links available.
By contrast, Frame Relay was some sort of a hack to avoid having a "real" 56K line run to a customer, and they went down all the time. They were so unreliable, we could hardly stand it. The FR customers became quite disgruntled.
This was in the mid-90s. I don't know if FR improved after that time or got a better reputation elsewhere. But we would definitely rather not have it around.
FR was problematic because the FR networks were oversubscribed, which was actually one of the benefits of the technology. The tech support for FR was also lackluster at best. The nice thing about FR was that you could aggregate multiple connections on one piece of equipment and pay based on usage rather than committed bandwidth.
The over-subscription was definitely a problem. The ISP I worked for had a fractional T1 in their main POP for frame relay (512K or something?) There was about 4 to 5x in bandwidth needed for customer connections, assuming 100% utilization. During peak times in the evening, the FR was massively overloaded and ping times would get into the 100's of milliseconds (normally it was 10 to 15ms IIRC.) The connection never went down though, even when they were slow.
I had 56k FR at home in the 90’s. I worked for an ISP and it was a perk offered to some employees. The connection never went down once in 4+ years. The reliability must have depended on your LEC.
We had a wide variety of customer connections, from dialup to an honest-to-God 14.4Kbps digital leased line, to 56K and T-1 leased lines and some T-3s in our backbone.
Our manager was a huge proponent of SMDS; in fact the SMDS diagrams made liberal use of the "cloud" icon to depict connections going in and out of the telco's switched network. He was able to derive great reliability and value from SMDS connections, and they were probably our fastest links available.
By contrast, Frame Relay was some sort of a hack to avoid having a "real" 56K line run to a customer, and they went down all the time. They were so unreliable, we could hardly stand it. The FR customers became quite disgruntled.
This was in the mid-90s. I don't know if FR improved after that time or got a better reputation elsewhere. But we would definitely rather not have it around.