1. A few pointers

Today, ATM is presented as a telecommunications network technique — or, more precisely, as an information transfer technique, a concept that encompasses multiplexing and switching — at the confluence of fields of expertise and usage that have traditionally been separate, even hermetic, from one another. Whether we're talking about the relationship between multiplexing techniques for transmission networks and those for switched networks, between those designed for voice communication and those applied to data, between those used in public networks and those in private networks, in the audiovisual or telecommunications sectors, there are countless examples of "incompatibility". Let's take the persistent incompatibility between the data units handled by transmitters (bits and then, for high-speed networks, bytes), those handled by switches (bytes and then, in the same perspective, cells),...