The IP Over NBMA (ION) Archive

[Albert Manfredi <manfredi@arl.bna.boeing.com>]

The 9 June issue of _EE Times_ has another article on ATM controversy.
Just as some of us have been pontificating on the use of ATM as an
access method to multiple WANs, Ipsilon, MMC Networks, and Cisco Systems
are pushing to use IP for everything instead, including in the telco
switches, according to the article.

The problem with these articles is that they say things like, "MMC
Networks Inc. introduced a chip-set architecture, XStream, two weeks ago
that allows prioritization of traffic with a granularity approaching
that of ATM."

This gives the impression that what ATM offers, that IP does not, is an
infinite quantity of priority levels. I suppose some might consider QoS
and circuit switching that way. Seems misleading to me.

The article also mentions how ATM in the LAN has been deep-sixed by such
developments as Gigabit Ethernet. And it also talks about the
uncertainty of using best effort as the only solution. All very topical,
I think.

Too bad that realistic network modeling has been shown to be so elusive
in the past. Seems to me that the answer to these issues would be
available from models.

Bert
manfredi@arl.bna.boeing.com