ATM is both a technology and a service.Sometimes the service is called _________________.
Asynchronous transfer mode(ATM) is both a technology and a service, sometimes called cell relay, and is a widely deployed, high speed, connection-oriented backbone technology that is easily integrated with technologies such as SDH, frame relay and DSL. A significant number of common carriers worldwide use ATM in the core of their networks.
Asynchronous transfer mode:-
Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a switching technique used by telecommunication networks that uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing to encode data into small, fixed-sized cells. This is different from Ethernet or internet, which use variable packet sizes for data or frames.
Cell relay:-
Cell relay is a network technology for data transmission that uses small data packets of a fixed size called cells. Cells are the basic units of data, and are widely used in common networks for communication. Just like frames, which are data packets of variable size, cells travel from one computer to another over a network. Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a particularly popular form of cell relay, and is based on cell units.