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ATM backbone to boost bandwidth

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Hongkong Telecom is to announce its new ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) backbone today. The four-node network is designed to increase bandwidth in the territory.

'With the popularity of Internet and multimedia applications, computer networks demand more capacity and faster response,' a spokesman said. 'HKT ATM service is aimed at providing a cost-efficient environment which helps our customers to deploy innovative broadband or multimedia applications.' He said Hongkong Telecom had tested several vendors before deciding to go with NEC.

NEC's ATM switches are specifically designed to carry public network traffic with congestion control, traffic policing and connection admission control.

ATM also has strategic benefits over current switches. Unlike Internet Protocol (IP) run on Ethernet technology, which transfers packets of data in differing sizes, ATM uses a cell package that is always consistent.

This is key to quality of service (QoS) issues such as bandwidth allocation and multimedia application transfers.

ATM has management capabilities for bandwidth on demand that ensure quality video transfer by allocating the data more bandwidth than text.

This is not available with IP, and video and voice transfers are often delayed, making them useless as business communications tools.

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