AT&T Divestiture Benefit
...technologies used in today’s market. Private IP addressing, ATM, and virtual private networking are all technologies available today due, in part, to the decisions made by AT&T after the breakup. AT&T and Frame Relay In 1991 frame relay was being offered by two companies, CompuServe and WilTel (Taylor, 2004, p. 43). At the time, AT&T was facing internal resistance to Frame Relay, as the equipment being developed was not capable of supporting it (p. 43). Ultimately, the decision was made to deploy frame relay using a competitor’s switches and at the expense of the companies own revenue private-line revenue. This decision to deploy frame relay ahead of schedule was a catalyst for a variety of other services that would have been impossible without it. The prevalence of the packet-switched network can be traced back to the early adoption of frame relay by AT&T. Internet Service Providers use frame relay, and consumers and businesses benefit from the advantages (in cost and data transmission) of frame relay over leased lines (Mellor, 2002, p. 3). The 1991 formation of the Frame Relay Forum resulted in a consortium of advocates of the technology that set out to define standards and tests for vendors to check their products (p. 5). Frame relay has become a backbone for the Internet, a concept that was inconceivable at the time of the breakup. Switched networks resu...