But I recollect that FORE ATM equipment using LAN Emulation (LANE) used a broadcast and unknown server (BUS) to establish a point-to-point ATM PVC for each broadcast and multicast receiver on a LAN segment. As well as being inherently unscalable (I think the BUS ran on an ASX1000 cpu), this scheme turned the single stream concept of multicast on its head, creating essentially a unicast stream for each multicast PVC client. -----Original Message----- From: Lamar Owen [mailto:lowen@pari.edu] Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:21 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: IXP On Monday 20 April 2009 18:57:01 Niels Bakker wrote:
Ethernet has no administrative boundaries that can be delineated. Spanning one broadcast domain across multiple operators is therefore a recipe for disaster.
Isn't this the problem that NBMA networks like ATM were built for?
Cheap, fast, secure. It is obvious which two Ethernet chose.
And which two ATM chose. Although secondhand ATM gear is coming down in price.... ATM has its own issues, but the broadcast layer 2 problem isn't one of them. Seems to me Ethernet layer 2 stuff is just trying today to do what ATM gear did ten years ago. Faster, of course, but still much the same. But, again, too bad ATM was just too expensive, and too different, and Gigabit Ethernet just too easy (at the time).