Multimedia multiparty services to native ATM desktops

Telecommunications, computing, and video technologies are rapidly converging, creating a new multimedia industry that will serve emerging markets on the information highways. To support these evolving communications demands, computer vendors, switching product providers, communications carriers, and users are looking to ATM as the unifying technology to provide seamless services. ATM, if brought to the user, will indeed provide him with increased power and performance. This promise however can be fulfilled only by bringing the virtues of ATM to the desktop. This paper introduces a European Project to tackle on one hand the challenge of bringing ATM to the desktop and on the other hand adding value to ATM. Bringing ATM to the end user has meant bridging the ATM Control Plane functions with those of the User Plane using a middleware type functionality. To add value to and optimize the use of ATM, a service platform making use of this middleware was designed and implemented.