Several years ago, implementation of a convenient electronic transfer process made it almost mandatory to carry a plastic card with us to obtain immediate access to our money in the bank. Deep in the background, another ATM, Asynchronous Transfer Mode, was already being used to implement the transfer of information in support of a more global medium - the Internet. Data transfer over a network is application specific and has historically been accomplished using information packets that can be of variable length, with size controlled by the application, protocol and transmission link being used or by network equipment settings. Voice communications or data transfer using frame techniques suffer from very similar problems although frame relay was designed for higher speed network environments.
Video files can be a mixture of both voice and data and suffer twice the transmission delay.
Real time video connections require a separate network without contention and a large bandwidth. To compensate for potential loss of information during transport across the network, applications may include error checking and correction techniques to prevent loss of data, with a significant increase in data transfer as the cost for this reliability. Optimization of data flow on the network is made horribly difficult because of the lack of standardization across applications addressing location, transmission starting and ending point, and size of transmission. The Internet exists as a connectionless public network service. Information travels through the path of least resistance without priority, control or security.