Voice on ATM-issues and potential solutions

Voice telephony is the primary service offered by today's public switched networks. At the same time the demand for data and video services is growing very rapidly worldwide. The use of overlay networks to support new services is expensive, and there is potentially the risk of economic failure of the services. Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks offer the potential of a single network solution to carry telephony, data and video services. The use of ATM to carry services raises a number of issues with respect to the carriage of these services. We examine the use of ATM to carry conventional telephony and other voice services in a public network environment. The paper addresses user-plane issues; there are also control plane and management plane interworking issues that are not addressed.