What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Asynchronous Transfer Mode?

What will be an ideal response?

The promise of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was that it could be a universal, integrated carrier of voice, data, video, and any other resource-intensive type of data. These are real advantages. However, two significant disadvantages of ATM are its high cost and high level of complexity. These two disadvantages have limited the widespread acceptance of ATM as a WAN connectivity solution. Because ATM cells are fixed, it is much easier to measure and regulate their bandwidth usage over a connection. The fixed cell length also makes ATM easier to manage and predict than variable-length delivery systems such as Frame Relay. Another feature that makes ATM so appealing is that a quality-of-service feature has been built into the protocol, making it easy to implement prioritization of data transmission. Communications considered critical can be flagged and have priority access to circuit capacity. As a protocol, ATM has been more successful as a backbone technology, primarily due to its cost and complexity. With desktop LAN speeds of 25.6 Mbps, ATM is at a disadvantage compared with Fast Ethernet, with its speeds of up to 100 Mbps. ATM switches, as well as NICs, are typically more expensive than those found in a comparable Ethernet network, another disadvantage. ATM, by definition, is a connection-oriented protocol that does not have broadcasting capabilities. Consequently, without complicated software interfaces, protocols such as Ethernet cannot directly detect an ATM network. The fact that setting up and maintaining an ATM network is so complicated also means that finding qualified staff can be challenging, and when found, likely expensive.