In general, however, companies that rely on an apparent trend toward centralized switches will be disappointed. Cable firms will do better by sticking to the ethernet paradigm of dumb bandwidth that has made them the envy of all in the emerging era of digital video. IBM and other computer firms with powerful ethernet and fiber technologies should not rush to adopt the public network paradigm. Telephone companies in particular should maintain an acute interest in their ongoing experiments with all-optical networks and other passive optical technologies. Any near-term successes of ATM, afflicted with the many glitches and growing pains of any new technology, are likely to come too slowly to deflect the continuing onrush of ethernets.
Ethernet prevails because it is dumb.
There was time even to put human operators into the loop, and a need to concentrate programming at one central location. But in the emerging world of supercomputers in your pocket or living room, networks will have to be dumb bandwidth pipes. What the coming array of desktop supercomputers and cheap massively parallel servers will need is passive dark fiber, mostly unlit by switching intelligence. Dark fiber can allow for the huge variety of data forms and functions, protocols and modulation schemes that is emerging in the new era of convergence between phones and computers. Ethernet is the protocol for a dumb pipe, a passive ether.