Patent ID: 6680937
Filing Date: 2004-01-20
Classification: H04J,H04L,H04Q

Abstract:
A method comprising:disposing a terminal adapter between a STM switch and an ATM switching network; classifying a signal from the STM switch as either a voice signal or a fax signal; and if the signal from the STM is a voice signal, then performing the following steps: compressing the voice signal in said terminal adapter with a compression algorithm, whereby resulting compressed voice signals have a bandwidth of less than 64 kb/s; converting the compressed voice signals between transfer modes in said terminal adapter using an AAL-1 adaptation layer, using at least one AAL-1-defined bit to mark cells containing the compressed voice signals according a level of speech activity contained in the cells; and dropping cells containing below a threshold level of speech when the ATM switching network is congested, and not dropping those cells when the network is not congested.