Meeting the operations challenges of a multi-megabit data service

The authors describe work on the Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS), a high-speed, packet-switched, connectionless data communications service intended to be available in the early 1990s. Key attributes of SMDS for operations are high levels of quality, availability, and serviceability. These attributes depend on the presence of operations technology capabilities in the network that provides SMDS and in operations systems that interface with the network. Because of the sophisticated characteristics of the service and the potential diversity of new network technologies and architectures, SMDS presents operations technology planners with a number of challenges that include administering new types of service features, maintaining stringent performance objectives, and managing a service provided by diverse technologies. The ways in which these challenges are addressed by operations technology strategies are discussed