4. Telecommunications links

4.1 ATM

ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) was conceived at the Centre national d'études en télécommunications (CNET) in Lannion, France, in the early 1980s, but it wasn't until the 1990s that its international expansion and the real start of its operation took place, following the adoption of its protocol by the International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunications Group (ITU-T), in 1988. The ATM Forum is a group of players in this field working to define interoperability specifications, and has over 800 members. It's a telecommunications link designed for professional applications in wide-area networks, but can of course also be used in local networks. ATM is a switching technology based on digital network links. These links are often made of fiber optics and organized in point-to-point...