Paul,
Interesting commentary. You sound like someone who knows a bit about technology. Let me add a few more tid-bits here.
>>CIR expects the U.S. market for ATM products and services to reach >>more than $2 billion within ten years
In fact the ATM equipment market (accounting for carrier switches, ISP switches - known as "internet to those less informed", enterprise WAN switch, WAN access, and LAN ATM) was $1.962B in 1997 as reported by Vertical Systems Group. They go on to forecast the ATM equipment market at $5.663B by 2000. Dataquest projects $2.5B by the year 2000 for just WAN Switches alone (both enterprise and carrier I suspect). So, the ATM market is very healthy. Why? Read on..
>>As long as the outside LANs are frame-based Ethernet, it makes all >>the sense in the world to maintain the framing vs chopping it up >>into ATM cells. That takes CPU cycles (time) to do, and adds >>complicity to the final destination....read less reliable.
You make an excellent point here. The problem is however that there is much more besides IP traffic out there. Voice and video are becoming big drivers. Since IP frames can be very large, mixing them with short voice frames or impeding video traffic becomes problmatic. The only way to effectively carry these mixed services today is to create a predictable environement for all traffic - today this is ATM. Some vendors are working to create predictable environments over IP however most vendors will tell you this is years away.
>>As if ATM is standardized?! Mayby bastardized, but surely not >>standardized!
Another good point. The ATM Forum and the ITU could do a lot more to move ATM standards forward. However there exists a stong list to start. Standards for IP over, voice over, and mulitprotocol over ATM all exist.
>>ATM must chop it up into 48bit data "cells" add some overhead, and >>pray it all makes it's destination....because if one does'nt, the >>entire IP packet (made up of dozens of cells) must be resent. >>Furthermore standards exist for closed loop congestion management >>which, for intents and purposes, eliminates the liklihood that a >>cell will be lost requiring an IP frame to be re-sent.
If you go to:
atmforum.com
you'll also see standards for traffic management. These standards eliminate the liklihood that a cell will be losed thereby eliminating the need to retransmit ("re-send") a frame.
Paul, the point of all this is that ATM will be required in the infrastucture to support multiservice (data/voice/video) environments. It's fundamental to the discussion. It's the only fabric known today that can simultaneously support these traffic types by providing distinct QoS. No other fabric can do this today. IP RULE's the enterprise and the network edges...but when it all gets moved across the backbone - ATM will be there. For this reson as the market for IP grows so will ATM in order support the increased user load. Finally, I'll point you to all the major carriers and most ISP's... Their backbones are ATM. Those that are moving back to frame will be missing a huge opportunity for the next 5 years.
Gary |
