Asynchronous Transfer Mode

IBM Turboways ATM 155 PCI network interface card

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by the American National Standards Institute and International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T, formerly CCITT) for digital transmission of multiple types of traffic. ATM was developed to meet the needs of the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network as defined in the late 1980s, and designed to integrate telecommunication networks. It can handle both traditional high-throughput data traffic and real-time, low-latency content such as telephony (voice) and video. ATM is a cell switching technology, providing functionality that combines features of circuit switching and packet switching networks by using asynchronous time-division multiplexing. ATM was seen in the 1990s as a competitor to Ethernet and networks carrying IP traffic, as it was faster and, unlike Ethernet, designed with quality-of-service in mind, but it fell out of favor once Ethernet reached speeds of 1 gigabit per second.