B. Business Market
There is an intense battle currently underway in the business market segment for market domination. The business market segment is the most revenue rich segment that is willing to adopt new solutions to
gain a competitive edge through an advance communication platform. The telecommunication equipment manufacturers are promoting various communication technologies to gain market
domination. The two key technologies are Ethernet and ATM technologies. Until the introduction of ATM technology, the business market had been mainly dominated by the frame based Ethernet
technology.
The major players like CISCO and 3COM have been consistently improving their Ethernet-based LAN technology in order to maintain their dominant market position. They have been very successful in
maintaining market share by bringing switched Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and most recently Gigabit Ethernet enhancements to the Ethernet technology. With these improvements in the Ethernet technology
they were able to meet the ever increasing bandwidth demand and at the same time maintain lower bandwidth cost compared to other competing technologies such as ATM.
Most recently, there has been a major shift in the market towards a more unified networking to handle data, voice and video traffic within the same network. For example, businesses would like to consolidate
their voice, data and video on the single networking platform to achieve significant cost reductions and ease of network manageability. The Ethernet works very well for pure data traffic. However, it is not
well suited to carry delay sensitive voice and video traffic. The Ethernet technology does not provide bandwidth allocation management and guarantee of stringent QOS requirements for specific traffic
types.
There are some attempts to bring these key features to Ethernet through reservation schemes such as RSVP. However, these are not native to the original concept of Ethernet technology which was intended
for a shared and statistically very bursty pure data traffic environment. Currently, the only key advantage the Ethernet has over ATM is cost of bandwidth. It is possible to offer Ethernet connection under 100
per user port today.
The ATM technology has been designed from the beginning to allow dynamic and flexible bandwidth allocation and provides required QOS for different traffic types for each user. The penetration of ATM
technology in the business segment has been slow due to the cost factor. However, the cost of ATM per user port is coming down rapidly. For example, the cost of 25 Mbits connection has come down to just
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Copyr ight © CRC Pr ess LLC
by Abhijit S. Pandya; Ercan Sen CRC Press, CRC Press LLC
ISBN: 0849331390 Pub Date: 110198
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C. Bandwidth Cost Trend