LANE

acronym

ISP & telecomnetworkingops culture

Stands for: LAN Emulation (over ATM)

LAN Emulation - the ATM Forum's scheme for making a cell network impersonate Ethernet. Famously the moment many engineers decided ATM to the desktop was a bad idea.

Because every LAN protocol assumed broadcast and MAC addresses, LANE bolted them onto point-to-point ATM with a cast of servers: the LEC client in every host, a LES to resolve MACs to ATM addresses, a LECS for configuration, and the aptly-named BUS - the Broadcast and Unknown Server - through which all broadcast traffic funneled. Every piece was a bottleneck and a single point of failure, troubleshooting meant tracing calls through all of them, and the whole edifice existed to emulate what a cheap Ethernet switch simply did. It survives as the cautionary tale about emulating the thing you were supposed to replace.

Also known as: lane, lan emulation, lec, les, bus, lecs

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