ATM implementations for large scale utilizations: what is needed before '92 to start in '95?

The future of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) as an alternative transport technique for providing integrated broadband communications (IBC) services is analyzed. The authors take into account the progress of standardization, the results obtained up to September 1990 from case studies under evaluation in the RACE Project R1044, and recent discussions in international conferences (state of the art). According to the results obtained, ATM can be considered as a universal transport technique only in the sense that all the services identified up to now can be clustered in service clusters and each service cluster can be supported in a flexible way by a specific, and specifically engineered, ATM network architecture. >