Abstract
Since ATM has been the object of much hyperbole as "the" or even
"the one-and-only" future network technology, it is tempting to summarize
some of the open issues and, more importantly, principal limitations of the
technology. Surprisingly, there has been little published in the technology
literature concerning the demerits and problems of ATM. Some of the problem
areas are shared with its two older siblings: X.25 and ISDN (Q.931) signalling.
In the following, we summarize some of the issues that may interfere with
widespread deployment, ease of high-speed implementation or present architectural
concerns. Due to the limited space, the arguments are by necessity abbreviated,
omitting the necessary qualifiers, counter arguments. Hopefully, these will
be added at the workshop.
