Carriers outline plans for SMDS, high-speed data.

Several of the nation's carriers detailed plans for initial deployment of SMDS (switched megabit data services) and Frame Relay Permanent Virtual Connection (FR-PVC) in demonstrations at this year's International Communications Association convention and the Interop show.

Companies include Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, Cincinnati BellSouth Inc., GTE, Nynex, Pacific Bell, Southern New England Telephone Co., Southwestern Bell Telephone and US West.

Due to increasing demands for LAN interconnections, distributed computing, terminal-to-host communications and image transfer over wide geographical areas, SMDS and FR-PVD are becoming valuable components of data services in the U.S.

FR-PVC service, primarily oriented toward private datacomm, will initially provide data transfer at speeds from 56 kb/s to 1.5 Mb/s over a wide area.

SMDS uses public packet switched networks to provide data transport at access rates ranging from 1.17 Mb/s to 34 Mb/s. SMDS is designed for both inter- and intracompany traffic.

BellSouth presented an SMDS showcase at ICA. It detailed such benefits as multi-location group document co-editing, customer network management, office imaging, PC-to-Unix connectivity, remote Novell file server access, video image capture and SNA networking.