TASI was invented by Bell Labs in the early 1960s to increase the capacity of transatlantic telephone cables.
Clipping or loss of speech would occur for all conversations that needed to be assigned to an available idle channel and in practice lasted at least 17 ms whilst information required to re-connect both parties was signalled by the TASI control circuits.
An additional freezeout period lasting between 0 and 500 ms would depend on the instantaneous loading of voice circuits.
One of the issues with using this type of technology was that the users listening on an idled channel can sometimes hear the conversation that has been switched onto it.
Another potential issue was ensuring that non-voice type circuits (e.g. Music or radio type circuits where pauses would occur infrequently) were not routed via TASI speech channels since these could seriously degrade the level of service where callers would encounter frequent clipped speech and breaks in the conversation.