Category: What Went Wrong

Red Pineapple was kind enough to share his 15-year-old ATM slides. They include interesting claims like:

ATM has the potential to displace all existing internetworking technologies

One single network handles all traffic types: Bursty data and Time-sensitive continuous traffic (voice/video).

All these claims are still true if you just replace »ATM« with »IP«. So what went wrong with ATM (and why did the underdog IP win)? I can see the following major issues:

We all know that the global BGP table is exploding (see the Active BGP entries graph) and that it will eventually reach a point where the router manufacturers will not be able to cope with it via constant memory/ASIC upgrades (Note: a layer-3 switch is just a fancy marketing name for a router). The engineering community is struggling with new protocol ideas (for example, LISP) that would reduce the burden on the core Internet routers, but did you know that we could reduce the overall BGP/FIB memory consumption by over 35% (rolling back the clock by two and a half years) if only the Internet Service Providers would get their act together.