Sprint Lines and DE packets

[CarsonsGirl]

Question for those who use Sprint for your frame relay connections: We use a performance monitoring tool (Lucent's Vitalnet) and all of our Sprint connections are showing high DE packets. I've heard that all Sprint network connections have high DE packets.

True or not true??

Thanks

 

[routerman]

I dont use Sprint, but I do support many FR customers. Depending on how you rate limit your FR traffic you will see DE marked packets, any packets sent above your CIR will be marked as such. Normally, in my experience these packets make it through the FR network, so long as your provider has adequate core bandwidth, unless problems occur in that core.

I've come to see them as a fact of life with FR networks, much as we used to regard collision rates on HD Ethernet.

 

[CarsonsGirl]

It's just a little weird that on my AT&T connections, I don't see the DE packets like I do w/the Sprint connections. There are some interfaces we have put traffic shaping on and it has cleaned up the errors but I was thinking of doing intrusive testing on these circuits to see if it would clean up the junk

 

[routerman]

This may be down to a number of issues, if your TS limits your max output to CIR then you wont get packets marked DE by your service provider. I tend to set up TS to allow bursting above CIR, this inevitably means I'll get DE marked packets, but as long as they are not dropped I'm not concerned.

I also enable the TS to reduce the traffic rate back to CIT if I see packets marked with the FECN or BECN flag. I'm used to dealing with Cable & Wireless frame, they may handle this differently to Sprint abd AT&T?