International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1993 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / To deliver high bandwidth, a ubiquitous inter-/intra-building cable plant consisting of single mode and multimode fiber as well as twisted pair copper is required. The selection of the "glue" to transport and interconnect distributed LANs with central facility resources over a pervasive cable plant is the focus of this paper. A description of the traditional problems that must be overcome to provide very high bandwidth beyond the narrow confines of a computer center is given. The applicability of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switching (interconnection) and Synchronous Optical NETwork (SONET) (transport) for high bandwidth delivery is described using the environment and requirements of Sandia National Laboratories. Other methods for distributing high data rates are compared and contrasted. Sandia is implementing a standards based foundation utilizing a pervasive single mode fiber cable plant, SONET transport, and ATM switching to meet the goals of gigabit networking.