This is serious business for the vendors and customers of MCI that set up shop in the lab to test products and services over its live network. Among those MCI customers who have run some cutting-edge frame relay experiments in the lab is International Game Technology (IGT), a maker of gaming software and products in Reno, Nev. IGT last year conducted a series of tests, including packetized voice over MCI's Concert Frame Relay service. The idea was to see just how much delay the voice traffic could withstand, with IGT's CAD/CAM applications running simultaneously. "We pushed the delay simulator on the circuit to 1.5 seconds to show them what kind of performance it would get," says Hassen Pruitt, an engineering manager at MCI Developers Lab.

Pruitt and his colleagues also helped IGT test for worst-case latency with the voice traffic. They set up a frame relay connection between Sacramento, Calif., and West Orange, N.J., to simulate a Reno to Sydney, Australia, link for IGT. The technicians used Micom's V/IP Voice Interface Cards connected to an Ethernet LAN, which then was connected to the Concert Frame Relay service with Cisco Systems 2503 routers. "We demonstrated voice over IP from our labs to their Reno headquarters, where their execs listened to it," says Pruitt.

Summit Solutions, a Chesterton, Ind., integration and consulting firm, last year tested video over MCI's HyperStream Frame Relay. An Ascend Communications' MAX router in Summit's Leavenworth, Kan., site was connected over the MCI frame relay service to a Cisco 2500 router in the Developers Lab. MCI engineers tested different CIRs (committed information rates) at different speeds, and Summit representatives analyzed the resulting video and audio quality.

"They eventually went with our frame relay service at 256 Kbps and zero CIR," says Chris Boyd, a senior engineer at MCI Developers Lab.

Network Computing's Real-World Labs® uses the MCI Developers Lab for testing WAN equipment over a carrier backbone. Recently, Network Computing teamed up with the lab to test frame relay net management products (see www.NetworkComputing.com/911/911r1.html).

"This gave us more visibility into the guts of the carrier network and how it affects customer premises equipment, better than a static WAN test lab," says David Willis, managing editor of technology at Network Computing. "And MCI can bring up and down frame relay PVCs in a couple of minutes."