ATM! The technology that would not die!

摘要

Listen to the analysts and it sounds as if ATM is breathing its last breath: "ATM once captured our imaginations, but it'll soon be legacy technology," says Michelle McLean, senior analyst at the Meta Group. What's killing it? Some say its own complexity. Others suggest price. And everyone seems to agree that gigabit Ethernet is driving a stake through the heart of the high-speed switching technology. Don't look now, but it appears as if ATM is rising from the grave. And it's got a grip on campus backbones, with 700,000 ATM ports shipped in 1998, and over 2 million projected by 2001—adding up to a $2 billion market, according to the Dell'Oro Group (Portola Valley, Calif.). Those are pretty good numbers for a technology that's been dismissed as dead.