is met for the various types of traffic flowing through the global internetwork infrastructure. In order to keep pace with emerging technology, to facilitate rapid delivery of broadband services and management of the services interactively, both the technical and marketing focus of the organization is gearing up to meet the challenges of a highly competitive marketplace.

ATM Transport Technology for VoDSL

Another technical working group -- VTOA (Voice and Telephony over ATM) -- demonstrated a commitment to aid in developing Voice over DSL (VoDSL) technology, which enables voice and data integration. This strengthens the demand for the technological and business case for ATM by opening a new set of applications for continuing the industry's work dedicated to the emerging requirement within the marketplace. Industry players look to VoDSL to fill the gap in telecommunications services currently existing in the small to medium-sized business markets.

"VoDSL is an important incremental step and work item within the ATM Forum. On this path to providing an application that consumers are looking for -- we are enabling a true mass market technology by tying desktop PC operating systems to the telephone/data network," said Rick Townsend, Worldwide Technical Committee Chair of the ATM Forum. "A significant amount of time and energy will continue to be devoted to the technical and marketing issues surrounding the rapid deployment of voice services within the access network this year."

The groundbreaking VoDSL ATM work drew the expertise of key people representing a cross section of service providers and equipment vendors and other interested parties focused on providing a cutting-edge solution integrating voice and data. The need for new and more efficient public network access was addressed in order to facilitate higher compressed voice, improved efficiency and the requirement for lowered delay, as the group examined the applications for VoDSL in today's communication infrastructure. As Voice over DSL empowers integrated access of voice and data to the masses, collaboration continues with the ADSL Forum toward integrating ATM as a transport technology for DSL. The ADSL Forum has agreed to focus its work on ATM as it provides a unique universal delivery platform.

ATM to Work with ITU H.323

Another key focus of the Technical Committee's RMOA (Real-time Multimedia over ATM) Working Group has been the establishment of ATM within the ITU-T (International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Sector) H.323 series of specifications, an umbrella specification designed for network IP compatibility. H.323 specifies protocols for real-time communication over packet-based networks. This will enable the use of ATM technology within the emerging multimedia market by adding ATM benefits such as QoS and security to increase the versatility of the application architecture in WANs and LANs.

"Coordinating the ATM Forum specification with the existing ITU recommendation is a giant step toward increasing the performance of multimedia communication," said Bahman Mobasser, ATM Forum Working Group Chairman. "We are pleased that the ITU will carry this standards-based specification forward."

New Concepts for Testing ATM

The ATM Performance Testing Specification is the first of its kind in the industry. It enables users and developers to see how well a system operates under well-known conditions and covers parameters like latency, end-to-end delay and effective throughput.

"Now users can carry out useful performance measuring experiments and establish valid comparisons among various alternative ATM systems," said Townsend. "The performance test methodology is key to facilitating industry cooperation."

In an outreach to ensure the user community and internal ATM Forum testing conformance work go hand-in-hand, the Forum is designing a style guide for developing ATM specifications. The PICS (Protocol Implementation Conformance Statement) Proforma document is useful to any potential purchaser of ATM equipment in gathering information about how well a vendor's product implementation is expected to conform to a specification.

"Consumers demand a familiar style of conformance documentation," said Townsend. "Uniformity is instrumental in developing ease of use and understanding throughout the entire ATM Community, in order to facilitate correct usage and lower development cost."

About the ATM Forum

ATM Forum is a non-profit international organization of about 550 companies representing all sectors of the world's computer and communication industries, as well as government agencies, research organizations and end users. Established in 1991, it is dedicated to speed the development and mass-market deployment of ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) broadband communications technologies, thus enabling existing infrastructures and new service technologies to take advantage of ATM's inherent QoS (Quality of Service), security and management features.

The Forum is focused on development of interoperability specifications, promotion of industry-wide cooperation and educational awareness of the technology's capabilities -- explaining why an ATM core is the best option for implementing a multi-service network. Further information on the ATM Forum is available at www.atmforum.com.

The next ATM Forum Technical Committee Meeting will take place in Bangkok, Thailand, September 26 - October 1st, 1999, followed by a meeting in Beverly Hills, California, November 29-December 3rd, 1999.

About ATM Technology

The ATM technology is the necessary communication infrastructure for information transport, reliably routing multimedia traffic over one network using fixed-length 53 byte cells. ATM is much more than a link layer technology, providing a full complement of features associated with network and transport layers such as network-based addressing, routing and flow control. A wide range of applications share available bandwidth enabling the ATM backbone to ensure QoS to all connected users. A major attribute of ATM technology is its network management capabilities, enabling carriers to manage one network transporting all different types of traffic.

ATM has been defined as the "glue" that interconnects heterogenous networks into a single, larger internetwork, seamlessly connecting various link and network layers. The technology's maturity (with roots in the telephone company networks and branches in data networking) demonstrates ATM as the viable solution for the enterprise backbone, transporting voice as well as delay-sensitive applications (such as video, images and data) over the same network.

ATM allows high speed Internet access users to build secure, high performance access networks over a low cost access technology. Customers benefit by paying only for the capacity needed, rather than committing a large monthly fee for circuits that go unused. Efficiencies in sparing, support and personnel training also result in significant cost reductions. ATM deployment has increased dramatically in the 1990s, as the proven technology that strategic planning requires. At the forefront of the movement toward efficient communication, the demand for ATM accelerates.