U.S.V.I.

8 Pages 1935 Words

Which is Faster?

ATM or ETHERNET?





Business Data Communications and Networking
Chantelle A. Hobson
December 4, 2001
Mr. Sajjadi
T,Th
2:30





CONTENTS


Introduction 3
Ethernet History 3-4
Something New! 4
Switched Ethernet 4
ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) 5-6
ATM vs. Ethernet 6-7
Comparing Multimedia Performance 7-8
Why do people choose Ethernet instead of ATM 8-9
What is ATM doing now? 9
The Future of Ethernet 10
References and Bibliography 11
Introduction

In the past there have been three distinct types of networks: voice, video, and data. Voice has always been the responsibility of the telephone company. Like voice, video has always been the responsibility of the television network. The third type of network, data networks, has had a relatively short history. The lines that once separated the three network types are becoming less and less clear. This new capability is costly because it requires the redesigning of the entire cable network to carry full duplex traffic. The rules for designing networks in the past do not apply anymore with customers demanding more bandwidth, Qos (Quality of Service), and higher utilizations while expecting the network to handle voice, video, and data. There are a lot of technologies for carrying this digital multimedia traffic, but we will only look at two of these in this paper, ATM and Fast Ethernet (100BaseT). Both of these are positioned to be significant players in the future of information networks but each is driving to out perform the other, and this paper will look at that race and its consequences.

Ethernet History

With the rush to provide some means to transfer data, Ethernet was quickly instituted as the standard data network. Fast Ethernet has not changed the standard of Ethernet it has only made it faster. The hopes for this new, faster Ethernet are that it will revolu...