Following the announcement of its pact with StrataCom Inc and Cisco Systems Inc, AT&T Co has come up with sketchy details of the Asynchronous Transfer Mode service it will begin offering early next year. Most of the specifics, particularly tariffs, are the subject of talks going on in the company’s ATM Customer Advisory Council. As reported, the service will be built on a combination of AT&T’s new GCNS-2000 backbone switch and Stratacom’s BPX. Initially, the network will support speeds of up to 45Mbps. Jayne Fitzgerald, product line manager for Interspan high speed data services, says that demand is coming as much from commercial as research organisations for the high speed services. Nor is the demand limited to esoteric multimedia killer applications. Instead, says Ms Fitzgerald, most interest is coming from users that are already using applications, particularly groupware, at slower speeds, which they now want to accelerate. Ms Fitzgerald puts initial demand at perhaps only a dozen companies in the US, but adds that they are leading edge customers which other potential users will be watching carefully. Because of the difference between Asynchronous Transfer Mode and other technology introductions, AT&T is placing heavy emphasis on the Customer Advisory Council’s role, particularly in working out the best tariffing regime. One of the things that we have noted with Frame Relay is that many customers prefered a fixed rate – when you are talking about ATM, I would imagine that some would be interested in flat rate too, but more will be interested in usage based billing, Ms Fitzgerald notes. The company says that it will broaden its collaborative Asynchronous Transfer Mode development effort as its ATM specifications mature, in order to ensure that all equipment supplied by other manufacturers will be compatible.
