5/1/00 Network World 50
2000 WL 9435372
Network World
(c) Copyright 2000 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.
Monday, May 1, 2000
41-60
ATM: A future that never was
Many people seem to consider me an ATM opponent, but I consider
myself an ATM realist. Wearing whichever hat you place on me, I'd like
to engage in a bit of an ATM postmortem.
Once upon a time, the future was to be all ATM, all the time. For
years I saw projections of $X billion worth of ATM sales N years in the
future. X and N varied depending on the consulting firm that was putting
out the projection, but the values of X and N seemed to stay consistent
year after year from any individual consulting firm. In absolute terms,
ATM has grown into a reasonable-sized business, but it remains a very
small part of the overall network market.
It is a bit of a cheap shot to talk about the fate of desktop ATM, so
I'll let dead dogs lie and move on to two places where ATM was expected
to take over the market: backbone and access networks.
With all the speed they can muster, telephone companies have been
rolling out ATM-based services at a glacial pace. In many parts of the
U.S., you can get ATM virtual circuit-based connections. Some offerings
even have distance-insensitive pricing, making them very attractive.
Many companies are signing up for these services, but this will be a
short-lived phenomenon.
I expect that IP services, including IP-based virtual private
networks, will take over this market. In addition, I don't see much
future for ATM in supporting IP backbone services. ATM is good at
splitting up links into smaller pipes, but this does not seem to be all
that useful when ISPs are growing to the point where they need full
OC-48 and OC-192 links between point-of-presence locations. I expect that Multi-protocol Label Switching will be used instead of
ATM where links still need to be subdivided. That leaves access
networks. This may come as a surprise to some of my regular readers, but
I think ATM features are a good match for the requirements of access
networks. Links to individual locations tend to be small, and if there
is a desire to multiplex multiple services over those links, ATM seems
to be a better technology than IP.
For example, I expect to see a lot of ATM-supported integrated
access devices being deployed as part of telco-based digital subscriber
line services. This is partly because much of the telco world hungers
for any way to maintain the circuit-based philosophy of the telco
networks. ATM will not give the telco world much satisfaction in this
case, however, because the ATM virtual circuit will only span the access
link and not be end to end.
Proponents of ATM irrationally assumed that a single technology would
meet all network requirements, and a lot of money was lost in that
assumption. I wonder if some IP proponents are guilty of the same
hubris.
Disclaimer: Harvard and hubris in the same article? No way. So the
above must be my own opinion.
Bradner is a consultant with Harvard University's University
Information Systems. He can be reached at sob@sobco.com.
---- INDEX REFERENCES ----
MARKET SECTOR: Technology (TEC)
INDUSTRY: Telecom Technology: ATM; Communications Technology; Telecommunications, All; Computing: Data Transmission; Computer Makers; Computers (INAT CMT TEL IDTS CPM CPR)
PRODUCT: Telecommunications; Computer Hardware (DTE DCO)
Word Count: 512
5/1/00 NTWKWLD 50
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