European ATM initiatives and early results

The authors present a picture of the rapidly evolving arena of wide area networking in Europe. There is a clear commitment from most European operators to evaluate the potential of ATM both as a high performance backbone and as a key to end-to-end communication solutions, involving the local as well as the wide area. The homogeneous approach in Europe to provide international services involving wide area services suppliers and network equipment manufacturers is paving the way for ATM deployment in Europe. The early results are quite impressive, especially considering the relative low bandwidth of the link required by application when they are singularly considered. This factor will certainly affect the costs of actual deployment, even if a complete cost benefits analysis cannot be fully worked out since tariffs are not yet completely defined for wide area ATM services