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To: Igor Nasonov who wrote (8713)	6/4/1998 7:28:00 PM
From: Elmer Flugum	Respond to of 12559

From Telephony Magazine, June 1998 Issue: ATM's invisible future Could IP make ATM so transparent that it disappears? JOHN WILLIAMSON, Senior Technology Editor So far as standardization is concerned, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) looks to be firing on all guns. By the time a meeting of the ATM Forum opened in Berlin in April, no less than 87 specifications covering various aspects of the fast packet switching technology had been agreed and ratified. Some of these specifications have been on the books for quite some time. A core set of ATM standards had been laid down in what is known as the Anchorage Accord in mid-1996. This approved a basic set of standards needed for the development, implementation and management of multiservice ATM networks. Subsequent meetings have built on this kernel. In Berlin, for example, the ATM Forum was looking at items as diverse as a 25-Mb/s ATM residential interface; the preparation of the extant inverse multiplexing over ATM standard for submission to the International Telecommunication Union; wireless ATM architectures; ATM routing and addressing management; the interoperation of different ATM networks; guaranteed frame rate; interoperation with H.323 terminals; and the controversial idea of native-mode connectionless ATM. Given the scope of this body of specifications and the potential benefits arising from deployment of the technology-the ability to accommodate mixed-media traffic, very high bandwidth and scalability, to list just three-it is perhaps surprising that ATM has so far made such a modest impact in the marketplace. Or are appearances deceptive? True enough, an important part of the ATM Forum's work is carried out by three market awareness committees, suggesting that much of the world is not yet beating a path to ATM's door. However, as the forum points out, users may be unaware (and possibly unconcerned) that they actually are using ATM. For example, many telephone company frame relay services have ATM backbones, and most Internet protocol (IP) traffic runs over ATM backbones. It could be argued that this lack of visibility is a measure of ATM's success-the technology is transparent and supports everything, and users are none the wiser. One thing that may be muddying the waters for "invisible" ATM is the now highly "visible" world of IP. Some network architectures envisage ATM cells transporting IP packets over a digital subscriber line (xDSL) or synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH). However, it is possible to run IP over SDH or xDSL without the intervention of ATM. And it's not unreasonable to imagine some operators might want to avoid the additional overhead of ATM. Indeed, according to a new report from the U.K.'s Ovum consultancy, entitled "The Future of Broadband Networking: ATM vs. TCP/IP," ATM will not be the leading technology in the future of broadband networking. "For many years the orthodox view of the development of broadband networking has been that it would use ATM transmission and switching," says John Matthews, principal consultant at Ovum and the report's author. "However, the rise of the Internet and enhancements to the TCP/IP protocol suite has changed that orthodoxy, and the future of broadband will not be dominated by ATM. Growth of the Internet and improvements to the TCP/IP protocol suite make it more geared to cope with multimedia, broadband and real-time communications." IP will be the dominant protocol for broadband wide area networking by 2002, Ovum says. Usage of both ATM and TCP/IP will grow rapidly, but by 2002, usage of TCP/IP will exceed usage of other protocols. As you'd expect, members of the ATM Forum have a radically different take on things. They say that with just IP over synchronous transmission you need very big routers whose cost-effectiveness is questionable. More importantly, without the addition of some ATM-like connection-oriented attributes, IP does not have the same ability to provide qualitative and quantitative service guarantees or to control granularity, and does not readily facilitate service differentiation. The forum also points out that carriers need ATM to be able to provide multiservice offers to their customers. For what it's worth, my money's on the invisible supporting the visible.