Gain from the pain Customers who manage to navigate those cross-country waters find that the availability of a consistent architecture at high speeds lets them deploy applications in their local enterprises that they couldn't support otherwise. That's the case at Silicon Graphics Inc.'s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., where several buildings are linked by 155Mbps ATM connections. This setup has made it possible for network managers to multicast video and audio transmissions of corpo rate meetings to em-ployees' desktops. ATM will also enable the company to roll out collaborative engineering over the wide area. As the range of ATM WAN services grows, so will its usefulness in servicing local applications.
Carriers also intend to expand the types of traffic they support.
A while ago, we thought we could design packages and they'd buy them off the shelf. But these users are real builders. They buy ATM in pieces and put it together themselves. Sometimes those building blocks inhibit local services and sometimes they enable them. Either way, the two influence each other, and that bond will strengthen as managers roll out more ATM gear and local bandwidth-intensive applications and tie them across WAN links.