The ATM Forum was founded in 1991 to be the industry consortium to promote Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology used in telecommunication networks; the founding president and chairman was Fred Sammartino of Sun Microsystems.

While ATM did not live up to every expectation, it remained an important core network technology.

The MPLS Forum (which supported Multiprotocol Label Switching had begun in 2000.

This specification defined a method of creating a service out of mapping TDM DS0 and DS1/E1 Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH) signals into Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cells.

The service was built around the ATM Adaption Layer 1 specification from the ITU.