How to get from A to Z

We recently found ourselves at an IEEE conference in beautiful Santa Barbara, California (fortune sometimes smiles even on computer curmudgeons). There were vendors small and large, all offering their own versions of a black box guaranteed to take the vital signs of your unique network and tell you faster than the next guy exactly where your problems were. We came away with the feeling that the point had been missed. The industry is doing what is easy, not what is necessary, to manage broad-band networks, most particularly Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). W e ' d like to lay out the problem parameters for consideration on the next available sunny afternoon (sorry--i t 's the California after-effect). Current network management is inadequate for the coming flood of ATM data. Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) won ' t do it. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) can ' t handle the scale. The hidden costs beyond hardware and software of continuing to do business in this fashion are staggering. The National Institute o f Standards and Technology is proposing an Advanced Technology Program (Michael Ransom, E-mail: mransom@nist.gov) because