Perhaps the biggest threat to ATM is the Camaro of the industry, Gigabit Ethernet, which is lathering ATM with negative press and criticism, creating further confusion in the market. If ATM is to be king of the road, vendors need to bring the technology--and the prices--down to earth.

The effort would not be wasted--upgrading the core network infrastructure, one of the most expensive purchases a network administrator will have to make, is a necessary evil and one with long-lasting effects. For many of us, beefier applications and multimegabyte user data files have put a higher demand on network resources. Larger data transfers, consolidated server farms and a surge in Internet/intranet traffic have increased backbone traffic, in some cases as much as tenfold in less than five years. The boom in Switched Ethernet has made bandw idth more available at the network's edge, but core network technologies have not kept up.

A year ago, the decision-making process was simple: FDDI for reliability, Fast Ethernet for low cost, ATM for scalability. With the advent of Gigabit Ethernet, it's become much more complex, and many of us can't help wondering whether we should deploy ATM or hold out for Gigabit Ethernet.

Gigabit Ethernet vendors are borrowing from the world of ATM to sell their wares. For example, at NetWorld+Interop last May, vendors demonstrated technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet with QoS, Gigabit Ethernet with bandwidth aggregation, Gigabit Ethernet with standard-based VLANsıand the list goes on. But we should not get swept into the hype and excitement of press releases and product demos. It's time for a reality check--how many of these features are actually written into the 802.3z Gigabit Ethernet standard? None. How many will integrate into a multivendor environment? Few at best. And what about ATM? ATM has had its struggles, too--vendor interoperability, standards compliance and legacy integration are problem s that have delayed widespread adoption of ATM.

Interest Waning? Consider where the industry stands. FORE Systems, a leader in driving ATM technology into the core of our networks, was founded in 1990. Five years later, Network Computing's University of Wisconsin labs did its first review of ATM NICs (see www.NetworkComputing.com/601/

601rev5.html), garnering a record number of responses. Clearly, interest in newer, faster technologies like ATM was strong, but our reporting showed that widespread ATM deployment was way down the timeline. More than two years later, the fruits of ATM vendors are ripe and ready for picking--but are customers still game for an ATM diet?

Now consider Gigabit Ethernet. The Gigabit Ethernet Alliance was formed in May 1996 to develop a standard for frame-based internetworking at the blazing speed of 1 billion bits per second (bps). For a technology that's just over a year old, there is certainly quite a bit of hype and excitement. More than 115 organizations ar e committed to making Gigabit Ethernet a reality. Several alliance members have demonstrated products, and we're already testing Gigabit Ethernet equipment in our labs.

To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of ATM vs. Gigabit Ethernet graphic, click here.