Nolle: It's really a battle of planning paradigms that happens to be represented as a battle of technologies. The Gigabit Ethernet paradigm says 'buy bandwidth instead of bandwidth management because bandwidth is cheap enough to oversupply your network'. The ATM paradigm says, 'bandwidth management is important; capacity can't be taken for granted, so you'll need a network architecture that can manage capacity for you.'

Cost will probably decide the issue, but there's no question that buyers will feel a strong attraction for the simplicity of the Gigabit Ethernet approach. The problem we have with the 'battle' is that we want it to be technical, based on features. It's not that way.

Gibbs: Yes, it is real. And the reasons are that lotsa money has been thrown at the former and that lotsa money could be made from the latter ... if the latter is that much easier and cheaper than the former. The ATM vendors don't want to see their investments wiped out and over the next six months they will all be doing their best to hurl stick and stones at the gigabit boys.

Heckart: What's nonsense about this and other ATM-related topics is that the message get broadcast out to the masses when it's only applicable to the networking elite. This is a real issue for a very few people. Network World and vendors alike should do a better job targeting messages to appropriate audiences and defining qualification guidelines that end users can apply so they quickly understand whether they belong in the line of fire or are better off watching from the sidelines.

Gigabit Ethernet has the high ground, the bigger army, a better supply chain, and nearly everything you associate with what's necessary to win a war. ATM may have somewhat smarter troops with slightly fancier weapons but better numbers and positioning usually win. For any buyer that doesn't need the extra capabilities provided by ATM - namely guaranteed QoS (quality of service) - the easiest solution is just to avoid the battleground and use what's most comfortable and what's 'good enough'.

Unlimited bandwidth can't fix every network problem, but it can fix most and Gigabit Ethernet starts to approach unlimited bandwidth for many environments. For those companies that need more than just bandwidth, or need more bandwidth than Gigabit Ethernet can provide, then ATM may be the better solution.

Briere: It's the classic elegant versus entrenched battle. If people are thinking about it in the same breath, then it's a battle. If you win enough battles, then you win the war.

You're going to see a lot of ATM implementations by the telcos into the home and probably into the office as well. Carriers like Ameritech, PacBell, SBC and BellSouth have already stated that ATM to the home/office is important, vis--vis their broadband deployment plans. So the question becomes how far will it go into the home/office?

I don't think anyone knows the answer to this, but both Gigabit Ethernet and ATM will be important in both LAN and WAN implementations. In the LAN alone, you have to ask what a LAN is anymore. If you have ATM into the home feeding five devices, is that a home LAN? Yes, probably. So ATM will be more pervasive than most people think, if only because of the home/SOHO telco-driven implementations.

Kearns: Its a real battle in a marketing sense, but outside of the hype market its a no-brainer. Gigabit Ethernet will be the dominant technology, for the same reason 10M bit/sec Ethernet dominates token ring and 100M bit/sec Ethernet dominates FDDI. More network managers understand Ethernet and have a high degree of comfort with it.

Bradner: In the campus backbone network it is a real battle. It is quite easy to figure out that Gigabit Ethernet will easily and cheaply (relative to ATM) meet most, if not all, current requirements for campus backbone networks. The only area where there is a significant question is that of quality of service (QoS). But few of today's campus networks actually use any QoS capabilities because of the existing application set and because the network link to the desktop is almost all Ethernet or token ring, which do not support any QoS functions.

It is no battle in the WAN arena. Gigabit Ethernet does not go very far (3 Km max.) and requires private fiber. Both of these limitations mean that there will be little wide area Gigabit Ethernet and I'd expect ATM to be the major player, at least for high-speed (greater than 45 bit/sec links). I doubt it is much of a battle in the building backbone arena either, with Fast and Gigabit Ethernet wiping out ATM as a player.

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