From: cmf851@huxley.anu.edu.au (Albert Langer)
Subject: Re: FASTPAC and AARNET
Organization: Australian National University
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 92 14:41:03 GMT

In article <1992Sep25.221252.159@degsyd.syd.deg.csiro.au> ip_boss@degsyd.syd.deg.csiro.au (Jack Churchill) writes:

>Is it about here we should start planning for B-ISDN/ATM to provide reliable
>mult-media services.  Definitive standards for B-ISDN/ATM are yet to be set but
>by the sounds of people I've talked to in the commercial networking world, ATM
>style networking has a very promising future which will effectively merge WAN
>and LAN.  Is Optus looking at it and should we be encouraging it?

Who is "we"? If you mean AARNET circles, what on earth would they encourage
it WITH? 
 
Surely the point of ATM is not just to merge WAN and LAN, but to
merge them both with PABX and local telephone exchange and the available
digital circuit switched network structure.

Take a look around any University connected to AARNET, let alone ordinary
office buildings. Notice the phone lines - thousands and thousands of
phone lines. Checkout how much Universities (alone) pay Telecom for their voice
networking traffic compared with the amounts they pay for data communications
(which is so insignificant to the Universities themselves that AARNET is
administered by a staff of two - smaller than a typical suburban milk bar).
 
The meaning of the initials "ISDN" is not exactly a secret, nor have the
preparations been concealed - yet we have these bizarre discussions about
whether Telecom, an organization which at least HAS a marketing staff,
understands the (insignificant) current WAN/LAN market well enough to 
successfully market one or another experimental offering against each other.
(All of which, as George Michaelson pointed out, are owned by the same
organization - and have no interest whatever either in attracting customers
from each other or making it easy to understand their tariffs).

The international standards for a MAC hardware interface have been pretty
widely accepted. There won't be any major problems converting existing
equipment when the telephone companies are ready to move in to the computer
industry. Most of the people who think they understand data communications
better than the telephone companies have also at least started shifting
from coax etc to Unshielded Twisted Pair - distributed via wiring closets 
from central risers conveniently located along with the rest of the UTP 
that connects extension telephones on the same desktops to PABXs. Call
them ATM switches if you like - same technology from the same industry and
a damn sight better designed than anything small companies like IBM have
been able to come up with.

The upper layer standards are pretty much in place too - except for
Open Distributed Transaction Processing - IBM actually DID know more
about transaction processing than the phone companies.

As for the middle layers - 3 and 4, it certainly wasn't the phone
companies who created the impression one could successfully run large
internetworks with connectionless protocols, let alone flat or semi-flat
address spaces.

The broadcast industry is a rather more interesting market than the
still immature computer industry. Are those optic fibres REALLY being
run to pillars within 600 metres of 60% of Australian subscribers in
order to interconnect LANs? Surely Telecom's public explanation that this
approach is clearly superior to AUSSAT etc for pay TV is rather more
credible than Government policy on the subject?

Xref: sparky aus.aarnet:942 aus.netstatus:194