AT&T Corp announced yesterday it has begun global rollout of its Asynchronous Transfer Mode, ATM, service which is already available in Japan through Kokusai Denshin Denwa, KDD. In September it will be available in North America through AT&T Canada Long Distance Services Co, in December in Britain through AT&T UK Communications Ltd and across the rest of Europe through AT&T-Unisource. AT&T has provided ATM service in the United States since 1993, Darrell Sagehorn, director for AT&T’s international data services group, said. Extending AT&T ATM services will result in a seamless, public-networking environment with quality of service levels that can support distributed-data and voice applications and enable multimedia services throughout the world. Operating at speeds of 1.5Mbps to 45Mbps, ATM supplies faster throughput than traditional data transmission methods. It interconnects high-speed applications like medical imaging, concurrent engineering, high resolution modeling, distributed data-base management, distance learning and desktop video and voice conferencing. AT&T’s ATM service uses permanent virtual connections, PVCs, to establish end-to-end connectivity. PVCs are permanent pre-configured network addresses that eliminate the need for call setups each time the user has to transmit data to remote places. Once provisioned, a PVC is available whenever the application requires it. The service will be deployed on 155Mbps facilities.
