ATM

ATM, is quite a common word and many would have heard about it, as the machines present outside the bank from where one can access his account at any time of the day to get the money from his account are called ATM, however, here when we are talking about the term ATM with respect to the networking world then the entire meaning of the term changes. In the networking world ATM is an acronym for Asynchronous Transfer Mode. It is a network technology used in nearly every network to send data in the data packets or cell which are of fixed size. Many advancement have been made to the initial technology of the ATM, therefore, the cell present in the recent units are small as compared to the cells present in the unit based on the older technology.

However, the advantage of the small consistent size is that the network does not get clogged and at the same time video, audio and computer data can be sent over the network at high speed and without consuming a lot of bandwidth, as the amount of the bandwidth allocated in this feature is pretty limited.

Therefore many people in the networking world believe that this is the solution to the problem of internet bandwidth congestion, however, many still remain skeptical about this and are not ready to believe this as a solution for the problem. ATM working differs than the TCP/IP protocol working which is being used extensively throughout the world. The difference is that at the time of data transfer ATM makes a connection with the desired computer and sends whole of the data over that one line of connection while in the TCP/IP the data is divided in to the packets and then these packets can take any routes or connection that are present between the source and the destination.