Amid the ongoing debate over whether Asynchronous Transfer Mode, FDDI or 100Mb Ethernet will dominate as the local area networking standard, 18 of Europe’s public telecommunications operators are planning the largest wide-area trial to date of Asynchronous Transfer international standards guidelines. The pan-European ATM Pilot aims to check the international standards from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute and Telecommunication Standardisation, formerly CCITT. It will also check proposed specifications from Eurescom, a parallel organisation set up by Europe’s phone companies. With 18 operator-participants, the European ATM Pilot is the first opportunity to test the CCITT ATM recommendations at this level, says Pierre Adam, manager of the ATM Pilot technical group at France’s Centre National des Etudes de Telecommunications in Lannion. Adam is a member of Commission 13, which handles the Asynchronous Mode guide recommendations. In Japan, NTT is experimenting with a certain number of manufacturers and there are some trials in the US; BellSouth in particular is very active. But the European project is the first configuration involving so many operators, he says. In July, ATC Finland and the Austrian PTT signed the protocol agreement for the pilot, bringing the number of participants to 18. The pilot organisation, which was set up last November by France Telecom, British Telecommuications Plc, Deutsche Bundespost Telekom, Societa Finanziaria Telefonica pA, Iritel SpA and Telefonica de Espana SpA, also includes Belgacom, Telefones de Lisboa e Porto, Telia AB, Norwegian Telecom, Swiss PTT Telecom and PTT Telecom Nederland, Telecom Finland, Telecom Portugal, Tele Danmark and Telecom Eireann. The pilot aims to validate technical and standards issues involved in the support of benchmark services internationally. Those services have been identified as FMBS/Frame Relay, CBDS/SMDS, and CBR Circuit Emulation. At a European level, we’re going to define specific elements from the ATM Pilot of how the guide recommendations work. We hope there won’t be any problems, but if a particular recommendation does not work properly, we will propose amendments to it, Adam said. The recommendations cover essentially cover interoperability issues. For the European ATM Pilot, operator-participants will set a network architecture comprising a ring transmission infrastructure, based on bidirectional PDH 34Mbps links, and additional nodes and links (such as PDH 140Mbps or SDH 155Mbps) which may be added to raise the capability, capacity, number of nodes and number of operators.
Pilot users to be chosen by each operator
After initial interoperability tests which run until June 1994, the participants expect to evaluate the experiment, likely bringing in pilot users to be chosen by each operator, subject to consultation with all the participants. A document outlining the ATM Pilot emphasises that it is intended only to support an evaluation of ATM technology and its ability to support benchmark services and not to provide high bandwidth transmission on a permanent basis. It does not correspond to a commercial service. Adam adds that the objective of the pilot is to provide all of the elements to the marketing people at the PTOs, which will enable them to take a decision, he said. Although Dataquest Europe networking analyst David Taylor applauds the PTTs’ cooperative effort on wide-area ATM, he notes it does not address the issue of ATM to the desktop. ATM is a product not only for the wide area environment, but for the local area, allowing you to connect up end-to-end. The ATM Pilot is public and part of the wide area scenario, but it’s only in the trial phase, which will probably last two years, he said, adding that Unless you’re running ATM end-to-end, you won’t get the full benefits, but you will not get ATM end-to-end connections in all of the cities in Europe until well into the next decade. ATM’s growth depends on support from local network suppliers, Taylor believes. Depending on which way the local network commu
nity swings could influence the success or failure of ATM. It’s fickle, too. Two years ago it was FDDI/CDDI, then came ATM, and now everybody’s jumping on the 100Mbps Ethernet bandwaggon, he said. While ATM applications are being developed, it is entirely possible that local network suppliers will move into the breach with 100Mbps Ethernet, Taylor argues. Adam agrees that Asynchronous Transfer Mode must have applications that users appreciate to achieve market success. In the end, he said, it will be the market to decide. Today, there is a niche for FDDI and a niche for Ethernet and it is for ATM to find its own place in the market: I’m optimistic that it will.
