Patent ID: 7606907

Claim:
A method for creating, maintaining, and releasing sessions between a plurality of customer premises equipment (CPE) and service providers via an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) access node, the method comprising: connecting one or more CPEs to the ATM access node via a network termination (NT) point; establishing a permanent virtual connection between the ATM access node and the NT point; establishing a tunneling protocol integrated with a signaling protocol over the permanent virtual connection between the ATM access node and the NT point; forming a virtual connection between the ATM access node and a service provider of choice on receipt of a request for a new session from the customer premise equipment indicating the service provider of choice, wherein only one virtual connection is formed between the ATM access node and each service provider; and at the ATM access node, performing routing between the customer premises equipment and the service provider using routing information provided by the signaling protocol.