ShopForT1.com today announced the grand launch of the long anticipated Real-Time quote engine designed to give the T1 shopper instant feedback, with 95% accurate loop pricing. Real time T1 prices have not existed until now. Many brokers claim to deliver real time information but the closest anyone has come to real time has been a page that you can check back and see vendors fill in prices the following 48 hours from when you entered your request.

"The real-time shopping model works" commented Adam Edwards, CEO of ShopForT1.com. "The travel industry is a perfect example of how the internet can enable everyday people to access very complicated databases. Now, we are pleased to bring instant gratification to those looking to price T1 lines." Apart from allowing people to research rates, ShopForT1.com also has a number of other unique features; most notably the ability to track leads referred by online affiliates and direct them to one of many part-time "closer" agents for personal care. This functionality allows ShopForT1.com to improve the shopping experience, opens the door for online affiliates to earn residual commissions by driving traffic, and manages professional part-time sales agents from all over the counrty.

"Many people have asked how exactly we figure out T1 pricing, since it is so sensitive to the geographic location of each customer with relation to the carriers' physical equipment. Our T1 Quote software is able to calculate the distance from any location in the continental United States to any of our providers' Points of Presence (POPs). From there, we use proprietary pricing algorithms to convert the distance into a price" commented Patrick Oborn, CTO of ShopForT1.com.

Frame Relay was developed to solve communication problems that other protocols could not: the increased need for higher speeds, an increased need for large bandwidth efficiency, particularly for clumping ("bursty" traffic), an increase in intelligent network devices that lower protocol processing, and the need to connect LANs and WANs. Like X.25, Frame Relay is a packet-switched protocol. But the Frame-Relay process is streamlined. There are significant differences that make Frame Relay a faster, more efficient form of networking. A Frame-Relay network doesn't perform error detection, which results in a considerably smaller amount of overhead and faster processing than X.25. Frame Relay is also protocol independent-it accepts data from many different protocols. This data is encapsulated by the Frame-Relay equipment, not the network.

'Today's LANs and computing equipment have the potential to run at much higher speeds and transfer very large quantities of data. With the diversity and complexity of today's networks, management can be a mammoth task if you don't have the proper tools. Each environment is a unique combination of equipment from different vendors. Frame Relay uses a packet-switching technology, similar to X.25, but is more efficient. As a result, it can make your networking quicker, simpler, and less costly.

Frame Relay sends information in packets called frames through a shared Frame-Relay network. Each frame contains all the information necessary to route it to the correct destination. So in effect, each endpoint can communicate with many destinations over one access link to the network. And instead of being allocated a fixed amount of bandwidth, Frame-Relay services offer a CIR (committed information rate) at which data is transmitted. But if traffic and your service agreement allow, data can burst above your committed rate. Since Frame Relay has a low overhead, it's a perfect fit for today's complex networks. You get several clear benefits: First, multiple logical connections can be sent over a single physical connection, reducing your internetworking costs. By reducing the amount of processing required, you get improved performance and response time. And because Frame Relay uses a simple link layer protocol, your equipment usually requires only software changes or simple hardware modifications, so you don't