3. ATM

Which multiplexing and switching technology can meet the requirements outlined above?

Fiber optics, the obvious basis for high-speed networks, offers transmission capacity several orders of magnitude greater than the individual requirements of the most demanding communication channels. The sharing of digital resources will therefore be temporal. To be perfectly multi-rate, the multiplexing and switching mode will be asynchronous, in packet mode. This is the immediate consequence of reconciling the properties of multiplexing modes with the constraints we have set ourselves.

What remained was the formidable challenge of reconciling packet mode, very high bit rates and real time. No one really believed in it at the time; the most adventurous, while talking about Fast Packet Switching (FPS), still only thought of applying it to data. ATM is...