7 Dec
1996
7 Dec
'96
8:59 p.m.
HDLC framing bytes = 3080633605 HDLC efficiency = 97.72 ATM framing bytes = 3644304857 ATM efficiency = 82.61 ATM w/snap framing bytes = 3862101043 ATM w/snap efficiency = 77.95
At a certain point, some of these arguments about ATM efficiency sound a bit like saying FDDI is terrible because 4B/5B encoding is only 80% efficient.
I think a more interesting measure of the value of ATM versus other wide-area technologies is some sort of measure of throughput per dollar.
The issue that everyone seems to be overlooking is network design flexibility. Even if ATM has higher overhead, you can only grow a FDDI network so much. It really isn't all that hard to max out most FDDI switches.