Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a high bandwidth, low delay switching and multiplexing technology for both public and private networks. ATM principles and ATM based platforms from the foundation for the delivery of a variety of high speed digital communication services aimed at the corporate users for high speed data, LAN interconnection, imaging and multimedia applications. Residential applications, such as video distribution, videotelephony and other information based services are also available on ATM. ATM supports transmission speeds of 155 Mbps and 622 Mbps and can support as high as 10 Gbps. As an option ATM can operate at either DS3 or DS1 standard.

An ATM network supporting cell-relay service accepts user data units called cells, formatted according to a certain layout and sends the data units in a connection-oriented manner just like TCP. The transmission is sequential. Dropping of cells can happen due to congestion although this happens rarely.