CIR?

[aromillo]

Our carrier for frame-relay advised us about 3 years ago to set our CIR at zero. Any ideas on why I would do that and will bumping up my CIR help in network slowness across my WAN? Thanks

 

[scraig84]

It is extremely dependant on the carrier and the level of performance that you get out of them. It also depends highly on the "slowness" you speak of and the application(s) experiencing the issues. Some carriers are very undersubscribed, meaning they have more bandwidth than customers, so a CIR really is not needed because it is a waste of money. If the bandwidth is going to be there, why reserve it? Look at this way - you are going to rent some cars when you and your business team go out of town and you call the rental company. They tell you that business has been slow and they have more cars than they know what to do with. However, if you would like to be EXTRA sure you get one, you can pay $15 extra per car for a reservation. If you KNOW they are going to have the cars you need there, why pay for extra for the reservations? The CIR in many cases is like that car reservation. However, how many "cars" does your carrier have and how many do you need? That is the question of the hour.

As to your slowness question, this can be caused by many things, and different applications are sensitive to different things. Some purely need more bandwidth, while others need less latency. The two do not necessarily have a direct relationship because you can't always throw bandwidth at a latency issue. You may need some type of Quality of Service to guarantee that latency sensitive traffic is prioritized over the WAN. In other words, its hard to say without an in depth analysis on what the nature of the problem is and what is going on in the environment and design of your network.