Quip-filled debate pits defenders, opponents of ATM against one another

By John Gallant
Network World Fusion, 6/3/98

San Jose, Calif. - In the end, the high-profile debate over whether the "ATM Forum ruined ATM" generated more heat than light and did little to sway the admittedly biased audience at the ATM Year 98 conference here.

But the John McQuillan-moderated quip fest, which pitted two opponents and two proponents of ATM and the ATM Forum, was notable for the stinging quality of the barbs exchanged by the participants. The spiking got off to an early start when Tom Lyon, founder of Ipsilon Networks, Inc. and now an executive with Nokia Corp., which purchased the IP switching company, said ATM was the product of "drug-induced decisions." Among those hallucinatory choices, Lyon said, was the decision to standardize on a 48-byte cell payload. He labeled it "a bad compromise made early on."

In addition to slamming the technology, Lyon lambasted the ATM Forum, saying the group had failed to define initially what problems ATM was trying to solve for customers and, thus, what it should ultimately become. "Is it a switching technology? A Layer 2 protocol? A quality-of- service mechanism?," he asked.

That "fundamental failure," according to Lyon, led the Forum to tackle too many challenges and to allow ATM to become too complex.

"All the industries came together around ATM and said 'Look how cool the future will be.' Tune in, turn on, switch cells," Lyon said. "But we all know there are horrible consequences with drugs. We got a whole new revolutionary network architecture when all we needed was a way to evolve our infrastructures. You see, a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum. There was something for everyone in those standards and early implementation agreements."

As if his pointed references to the Woodstock era and a Zero Mostel-era Broadway weren't enough, Lyon concluded that the ATM Forum had created a camel with 10,000 humps. He brought his overall message home with an ever more vivid analogy: "The ATM Forum is like a teenage girl who can't say no. Pretty soon there are lots of undesirable guys hanging around and then nine months later you wind up with a product that no one wants to support."

Those undesirable types were the nontechnical marketing and business executives Lyon says swamped the ATM Forum seeking approval for all sorts of nonessential ATM add-ons. "The engineers checked out and trouble checked in," Lyon chimed.

Not to be outdone, opponent Robert Sansom, vice president of architecture and one of the founders of FORE Systems, Inc., was more than happy to pick up on Lyon's camel reference, saying that ATM is indeed like a camel, albeit a beast with only one or two humps. "The camel is a pretty well-designed animal. It can go without water for 51 days or so." Sansom admitted that the Forum could have done some things better, such as involving component vendors in its discussions earlier on and handling the debate over traffic management specifications better. But he said the Forum had done a "pretty good job" developing key ATM specifications such as LAN Emulation and Multi-Protocol over ATM that are helping customers build stable, scalable networks.

On a less cerebral note, Sansom added that FORE is "from Pittsburgh and we don't do drugs there," and he mock-mistakenly referred to Ipsilon, Lyon's former company, as "Exsilon" - an apparent reference to Ipsilon's failure to live up the early hype about IP switching. He also jabbed at the Ethernet community's holier-than-thou attitude on standards making, citing the failure or slow development of key specifications, such as the Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) standard.

Sansom had help from George Dobrowski, the president of the ATM Forum, who said that ATM is not ruined at all, in reference to the fact that ATM is estimated to be a $5 billion a year market. "ATM is surviving and thriving. It is fast, reliable, standard and scalable. It is IP-, SNA-, voice- and video-friendly. It supports nonstop nets that don't have to be upgraded every two years. It's true that we have taken on a broad scope of projects, but all that work is paying off now."

How did that come to pass? Not surprisingly, Dobrowski gives credit to the Forum, while admitting that the organization could have handled itself better in some areas, such as combatting the uber-hype about ATM-as-panacea that has come back to haunt the technology. He blasted right back at the IP camp, saying standards-makers there are also threatening to add too much complexity.

"There is a mushroom cloud of specs," Dobrowski said. "All of these specs will tax processing power. How will we support all of them and how will all these RFCs and specs interact? There's quite a challenge ahead there."

Dobrowski answered Lyon's query as to just what ATM is, saying ATM is a "transmission and switching protocol" and the perfect vehicle for IP traffic.

But Lyon wasn't the lone voice criticizing ATM and the ATM Forum. Cohort Gordon Stitt, president of Gigabit Ethernet vendor Extreme Networks, Inc., said the ATM camp failed to foresee the dominance of IP and the impact of Moore's Law, a reference to the fact that many routing functions can now be handled inexpensively and powerfully in hardware. More important, Stitt said ATM was designed to serve two masters - LAN and WAN users. But it can't. "It is a principal tenet of networking that LANs and WANs are fundamentally different. ATM has struggled to meet the needs of these two diverse markets."

In fact, bringing the telco world into the equation slowed down the rate of innovation in the ATM world, according to Stitt. "The ATM Forum wasn't in a hurry compared with the Gigabit Ethernet market, which is dominated by small companies who have to get their products to market quickly. The telcos have plenty of time to wait. They're looking at this in terms of years.

"ATM is simply too hard and complex," Stitt continued. "It may be alright for the telco backbone. The carriers can afford it. Most organizations can't. All the benefits the Forum discusses are for vendors. Users just want simple, cheap bandwidth to the desktop."

Stitt added that the Forum "tried to reinvent networking for the future. That's too hard and unfocused."

Lyon said in a closing remark, "ATM can do lots of things but it is not very good at any one. ATM continues to spread and add more humps. It is not clear what it is the solution for."

After the verbal fireworks, the audience seemed to feel that the ATM camp had won the day. But John McQuillan, founder of the ATM Year events, mused, "There has been a lot of acrimony over IP and ATM. ATM was perceived as a threat to IP. If we did it over again and we didn't threaten IP, life would be easier for ATM."