ATM charging-the buyers view?

ATM is at a very early stage at present. Is the benefit of ATM to enable the emergence of new services which will take advantage of the bandwidth and flexibility which ATM can support, or is it an advanced multiplexing technology which can allow the operation of highly efficient and cost effective communications networks? ATM can be both of these. However, if we are thinking about charging for ATM, we need to be clear about what it is offering and to whom. Some particularly strong messages emerge on the buyer´s view of ATM charging: charging should avoid surprises in the telecoms manager´s bill; and charging should not be based on network congestion. Other related and relevant points which have been raised by the buyers are: it must be possible to audit the ATM bill; the need to link ATM charging to quality of service; buyers are not interested in paying for cells but in services and quality of service; there must be a means of linking the operators charging principles to the buyer´s charging system; there is a need to determine who pays for which direction of a call; and the balance between latency and throughput is an important issue in charging