The IP over ATM Mailing List Archive by date

[manfredi@engr05.comsys.rockwell.com (Albert E. Manfredi)]

> From:	craig@aland.bbn.com    29-MAR-1996 12:30

> Masataka was being ironic (note his smiley).

I agree that Masataka was being ironic. However, in his irony, he did say 
something which is quite true.

> I think the trajectory (currently) is that IP will be the dominant user of ATM.
> (A good sanity check would be to learn how much of today's Frame Relay traffic
> is IP, since ATM is targetted to replace Frame Relay at some point in the
> future).

This seems to be the case, but I'm pretty sure it was _never_ the intent 
of its founders. The multi-purpose carry-all technology was to be ATM, but 
guess who didn't take that ball fast enough and run with it. Or maybe it's 
the case that PCs, for now, have become the de-facto "information 
appliance," which gave PC net protocols the edge, which gave IP the edge.
So IP, for now, has taken that role.

> So far as I can tell, only a small fraction of voice traffic will likely use
> ATM, and in any case, voice is a shrinking proportion of the telecom network
> (we're not quite at the point at which IP is the dominant user of long-haul
> phone lines but some back of envelope calculations suggest it won't be too
> many more years -- which is rather staggering).

This could be very misleading, though. When people assume exponentials of 
what are actually S curves, all sorts of fantastic predictions emerge. 
Witness the slow-down of PC sales in the US (they will surpass TV sets!) 
(In my view, _if_ any such thing as one multipurpose "info appliance" ever 
really happens, it won't be the PC we know today.)

> As you note, the monkey wrench in this works is Video on Demand.  If (a) as
> seems likely, the cable modems use ATM to deliver Video on Demand (that's
> 802.13's latest decision) and (b) people choose to use raw ATM rather than
> send video over IP over ATM [a wide open issue right now] and (c) Video on
> Demand takes off [another controversial topic in the cable industry right
> now], then VoD is likely to have a large share of the traffic, maybe the
> majority.  (Consider that one VoD channel will be about 6-8 Mbps sustained).

Precisely. Many such scenarios can be created. If VoD becomes the hot 
item, _it_ could just as easily spawn other services as did ARPANET. The 
public is fickle.

Bert
manfredi@engr05.comsys.rockwell.com