K wrote:
[useful summary of gigabit ether situation]
Steve also made exclnt point that the ATM vs 'promiscuous' medium
have other inherent distinction of potential interest
to ISPs with policy/privacy/security concerns
I'm not quite sure I understand this bit; isn't switched ether
(of any speed) equally secure as an ATM switch would be?
-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com I speak only for myself
One aspect of this has more to do with on by default vs off by default
nature of traffic in the mesh. In an multiaccess broadcast medium, port A
can send traffic to port B. In a (virtual)circuit switched environment,
this can't be done w/o setting up explicit connections between the two
parties.
Given the occasional creative uses of multiaccess broadcast media exchange
points, this can be seen as a major operational win, although some ATM
exchange operators set up full mesh of PVCs by default, negating this
advantage.
Port filtering on multiaccess broadcast media can provide this feature
if the switches can do this w/o melting.
-dorian
It's kinda hard to flood the ARP table of an ATM switch and have it let you
see the traffic on another PVC. It can be done with a switch. (Not
necessarily _all_ switches but, some.)