IXP

Wed Apr 22 17:09:36 UTC 2009

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 at pari.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:21 PM
To: nanog at 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).