Switched Multi-megabit Data Service (SMDS) My [foreign] policy is to be able to take a ticket at Victoria Station and go anywhere I damn well please Ernest Bevin Many companies espouse a similar policy in relation to their data communications. They have paid dearly for their ticket and want unfettered and reliable routes for their information. Driven by the growing importance of data communications to business operations and the trend towards global operation, the demand for effective wide area data communications is increasing rapidly. . | Total Area Networking ATM IP Frame Relay and SMDS Explained. Second Edition John Atkins and Mark Norris Copyright 1995 1999 John Wiley Sons Ltd Print ISBN 0-471-98464-7 Online ISBN 0-470-84153-2 4 Switched Multi-megabit Data Service SMDS My foreign policy is to be able to take a ticket at Victoria Station and go anywhere I damn well please Ernest Bevin Many companies espouse a similar policy in relation to their data communications. They have paid dearly for their ticket and want unfettered and reliable routes for their information. Driven by the growing importance of data communications to business operations and the trend towards global operation the demand for effective wide area data communications is increasing rapidly. Corporate data networking mainly interconnecting the LANs located at a company s various sites is a growing and valuable market and customers requirements and expectations are growing with it. SMDS the brainchild of Bellcore the research arm of the Regional Bell Operating Companies RBOCs in the USA has been developed to meet these needs. SMDS as the switched multi-megabit data service is invariably known is a public high-speed packet data service aimed primarily at the wide area LAN interconnection market. It is designed to create the illusion that a company s network of LANs its corporate LAN internet is simply one large seamless LAN. It has one foot in the LAN culture in that like LANs it offers a connectionless service there is no notion of setting up a connection users simply exchange information in self-contained variable-length packets and there is a group addressing option analogous to the multicast capability inherent in LANs that enables a packet to be sent simultaneously to a group of recipients. But it also has a foot firmly in the public telecommunications culture in that it uses the standard ISDN global numbering scheme and it provides a well-defined service with point-of-entry policing the SMDS access path is 66 SWITCHED .
