3 ms·
Don’t get me started on the ugly detour that was ATM, for when Bellheads wanted to build out the Internet like a phone switch, and when no one could agree on op
by kstrauser 1y ago
Don’t get me started on the ugly detour that was ATM, for when Bellheads wanted to build out the Internet like a phone switch, and when no one could agree on optimal cell sizes and they compromised on 53 bytes to piss off everyone equally.
(Also, to have been a fly on the while when you worked out that whole congestion thing.)
- Animats 1y agoIt took over two decades for things to settle. The telco people had ATM and Frame Relay and DSL voice and a Bell Labs thing called Datakit. They were trying to get deterministic voice, so voice over packets wouldn't suck. What we ended up with is voice with lag, jitter, echo, dropout, and over-compression. So nobody talks on the phone much now.
- kstrauser 1y agoGive a fellow a little warning before conjuring those names! When it became clear that packet switching was going to win out, did the telcos ever try to emulate circuits with UDP flows or similar? It seems like IP over switched circuits would look a lot like virtual switched circuits over IP, if you squint just right.
- windexh8er 1y agoI remember working on a federal contract back in the early 2000s where there was a camp of ATM folks against us who were pushing Metro Ethernet and MPLS. The TL;DR of it was the ATM guys won, spent millions of dollars, only for us to come in and replace it all a year after it was supposed to have been done in the first place. Cisco sure made some good money on failed ATM projects back then!
- kstrauser 1y agoI witnessed the same. Yeah, charging twice to build out each link is a pretty good profit model.
- mannyv 1y agoMy understanding was that ATM was 53 bytes because it was a balance between latency and processing efficiency. If every packet is the same size your packet processing can be much faster.
- kstrauser 1y agoThat’s right. But… 53?! We were all gobsmacked when that was announced.