I never understood ATM. I must not be part of the target audience. Now that 100base-T is here, I get it even less. I heard a speaker from the ADSL forum lately who claimed that ADSL would eventually be all ATM. That does not make sense to me.
Sometimes I wonder if the phone companies of the world have been tricked into believing that they want ATM only to find out that what the customers want is large packets (not 48 byte payloads) and that their networks are setup all wrong.
I'm planning to look into wireless-ATM next, just because anything that sounds that twisted might actually be interesting.
Just in case anyone was wondering, I was stupid and got a Skytel 2-way pager. I lived the dream for six months before I woke up. It never worked right. Let me repeat - It never worked right. The really weird thing is that in Boston it was completely unreliable but on the show floor of Comdex in Las Vegas it worked perfectly for three solid days... Guess I should move to LV.
Also, to add to the frustration Skytel's Internet gateway was setup via UUCP (hey, wake up guys - UUCP went out 10 years ago) and their customer support was just plain bad. Their billing people were even worse. Never again. I got a PCS phone instead.
I like my PCS phone. It works. The audio artifacts are a little strange but it works better than the analog phone I had before. The cool thing is that the PCS phone will also do AMPs if thats all it can find. (and they claim it will be a pager also, but I've yet to see that service)