Chapter List

Overview

One of the most entertaining aspects of technology is how the inventors or, in the case of ATM, the specifiers conceived the technology would be used, and how the vendors and users conspired to use it. In the case of ATM, what has been called the Magic of the Market has been especially active. A number of these aspects are discussed below.

5.1 PRESTANDARD

If the time-honored way to market share and niche dominance is being the first with the mostest, what does one do when a standard is clearly needed and yet the standard is not there? The answer is the prestandard, or the proprietary implementation that makes the product useful to users and represents the company s best guess at what the standard implementation will look like.

Both FORE Corporation, a market leader at the low end, and StrataCom (now Cisco), at the network edge, have traveled the prestandard route. FORE satisfied demands for high-speed LAN interfaces with a 140-Mbps version of the TAXI interface that was later rejected by the ATM Forum (the 100-Mbps version was approved). Also, as the first users struggled with trying to communicate with only PVCs, FORE s first implementation of SVCs was prestandard. In the case of StrataCom, they already had a successful cell switch for data (most of the commercial frame relay networks used it), so they backed it into the ATM standard.