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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (28512)	12/22/1997 8:51:00 AM
From: Pullin-GS	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

ATM is Not Dead! ATM was never alive (Part I)....so it can't die.<G> Please read on: expectations for the ATM market have indeed declined This one statement says it all. While ATM has been floundering in the water, LAN transports, such as Fast Ethernet have taken over the Local area network arena with little compitition from ATM. ATM's main selling point has been a QoS that is application selectable (user selectable), but ATM has yet to deliver a user accepted upper layer protocol(s) (TCP/IP is an exmple of an upper layer protocol) that can take advantage of QoS, much less has the ATM forum and standards bodies developed a set of applications that ride on top of the ATM protocol suit (telnet, ftp, http are TCP/IP based applications for comparison). CIR expects the U.S. market for ATM products and services to reach amore than $2 billion within ten years 100Mbps Ethernet sales account for about $2 billion in a matter of months. This is a far cry from current LAN-centric sales...and it's 10 years out! I expect that ATM will continue to do well in some WAN providers' backbones, but many of them are reverting back to frame based, high speed transports (of which ATM ride on top of) such as SONET. It does not look good at the moment for ATM. With shared-bandwidth LANs pumping out 100 Mbps This one statement is very missinformed and does not represent the current trend. Shared LANs are a thing of the past. Switched LANs are standard modern (relative to this writing<G>) deployments for most new installations. but there is more reason to use ATM in LAN backbones. 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. Gigabit Ethernet has yet to be fully standardized As if ATM is standardized?! Mayby bastardized, but surely not standardized! The Gigabit Ethernet standard was 95% complete when the 10Mbps 10BaseT IEEE standards for 802.3 where completed some years back. What awaites are some relativily simple media components (wire, fibre, distance, etc.) to be hashed out. Ethernet is Ethernet...thats the beuty of it. A frame is a frame of course....no BS inbetween. ATM's chances also seem to be increased by the fact that IP is flourishing. Actually it is quite the opposite.....IP is frame based, and Ethernet is just that as well. It is very simple to transport IP over Ethernet....just give the entire IP packet (regardless of size) an Ethernet heaeder/trailer and your ready to send it down the line. 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. And besides, since when does IP support QoS? It does'nt! We have just taken one step forward, two steps back. Not cool.:-(