Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 14:28:27 -0400 From: Paul Ferguson <pferguso@cisco.com> Subject: Re: ATM Wide-Area Networks (was: sell shell accounts?) [...] It depends on what you mean when you say 'performance'. I think there is more and more interest being vested in ATM inefficiency, and alternate technologies to better efficiency in the long-haul.

Recall Jerry Scharf's numbers; they're indicative of the issue. [...] 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. -tjs