Beyond ATM!

Introducing ATM.

ATM. That's another one of those TLAs (Three Letter Acronym) that stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode. And, as everybody knows (or should know), ATM is the technology that will take us into the 21st century.

Simply put, ATM is the Mama Ragu's Spaghetti Sauce of telecommunications! Voice, video, facsimile, telemetry - you name it, its in there. ATM takes digital streams from anything, chops them up into tiny packets, and switches them all over the world. It can make connections between devices in a blink of the eye!

Its all digital; 1s and 0s. That makes it highly immune to noise. You see, with digital signals, if it ain't a logic 1, its a logic 0 (and vice versa)! Ironically, it is this property that will ultimately be ATM's undoing.

Cut the Static. (Those dirty circuits)!

To improve efficiency at the physical media layer, ATM doesn't do any error checking on data. It is designed to be used on high-speed, error-free fiber-optic circuits or short metallic cable runs. If any errors occur, heaven forbid, its up the application to retransmit the data. Anyone that has surfed the 'net over noise or overly congested Frane Relay links knows the impact that this has on the application. Your browser sputters about in mid-transmission, while your Winsock/TCP application eventually gets around to requesting a retransmission of errored data. For many UDP services, like C-U-C-Me video, RealAudio, or I-Phone, there's no retransmission. You've just got to put up with the static or clipped images.

But, if you've got error-free transmission media, what noise do you have? Well, you've still got switching noise. That's the noise that happens when your circuit is switched through other electronic devices. In an analog environment, that noise gradually builds up through each switching device that the circuit passes through. In a digital environment, the 1s and 0s are properly regenerated, negating the impact of noise.

An Optical Solution (Can You See the light)?

What to do about the analog noise buildup problem? Gentle reader, keep an eye on continued advances in optical computing and switching. AT&T is the most dominant force in this area through its affiliate, AT&T Bell Labs.

Lightwave multiplexing is a technology that combines different streams of light into a single fiber optic cable. Each stream operates with a slightly different shade of light to distinguish it from other signals. Does this sound like the Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) of the old days. You bet, the principles are essentially the same.

Information Everywhere (and not a drop available)!

But ATM suffers from more than just noise. Its a bandwidth hog. Given the same amount of information, it takes much more frequency bandwidth to transmit a signal digitally, as opposed to its analog counterpart.

And this precious bandwidth is, and forever will be, at a premium. Bandwidth is a limited resource, ultimately worth more than diamonds. Look at the money the FCC raised when it auctioned off the PCS (Personal Communications System) frequency spectrum!

A More Human Approach (It's an analog world)!

Ones and Zeroes just aren't natural. Things in life just aren't black and white. We don't speak that way. We don't see things that way. We don't write that way. Ones and zeroes were simply thought up by mankind as a matter of conveniance (and by people with nothing better to do)! In fact, digital systems are merely an interpretation of reality.

And thus, ATM will come and go. Of course, you've got to jump on that ATM train when it arrives at your station. You will probably be on the ATM train for awhile (I predict until about 2020). But sooner or later, the ATM train will stop, and a new, rosy era of analog-based, information superhighways will await you! Time to switch trains! I guess its an analog world after all!