Integrated networks industry momentum misses the mark?

This paper examines the telecommunication and data networking industries and evaluates them on the basis of how well they are evolving to satisfy the government requirement for an integrated multimedia services network and on their general approach to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) implementation. Several areas are identified in which the needs of an integrated services network are not being addressed at the local access and private enterprise level for users of the Defense Information Infrastructure (DII). The paper describes development work at Electrospace for a new multilayer telecommunication system that addresses the integrated services requirement within the framework of an open systems interface designed for DII and legacy equipment. The telecommunications industry is focusing on line constant bit rate communications, such as voice and videoconferencing, and remote access to LANs with the ISDN network and a B-ISDN ATM backbone. The data networking industry is focusing on client-server transfer of static multimedia files, using ATM and LAN emulation as a means of accommodating large multimedia files in a timely manner