A vision for residential broadband services: ATM-to-the-home

To achieve the grand vision of the residential broadband market, thousands of applications must be enabled on the residential broadband networks. Instead of constantly searching for the killer application, the best way to enable this market is to build a platform that can support thousands of applications, because collectively these applications will become the killer application. This paper presents a vision of a residential broadband network architecture based on the ATM-to-the-home architecture. ATM-to-the-home is not only the best technical solution available to support the diverse network requirements for residential broadband services, but also the best solution for deploying residential broadband networks strategically. ATM-to-the-home is fundamental to enabling the residential broadband market. This network architecture applies to the various residential access network (RAN) architecture being deployed today such as hybrid fiber coax (HFC), fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC), fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and ADSL technologies. An application classification and characterization is presented to understand the networking requirements of various residential broadband applications. A new traffic class is identified which must be supported for residential services