Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Asynchronous Transfer Mode" in English language version.
1989: CCITT compromised and set the payload at 48. Unfortunately, nobody was happy. US didn't get a power of 2, 5 byte header is 10% overhead. 48 bytes too high and France would need echo cancellers.
After great debate, the committees finally coalesced into two camps: one advocating 32-byte cells, the other advocating 64-byte cells. In the spirit of technical compromise, a 48-byte ATM payload was finally agreed upon.
ATM is based on the concept of cell switching. ATM combines the benefits of traditional packet switching (used in today's data networks) and circuit switching (used in the telephone network).
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a cell-switching, connection-oriented technology.
