In telecommunication, the term long-haul communications has the following meanings:
1. In public switched networks, pertaining to circuits that span large distances, such as the circuits in inter-LATA, interstate, and international communications. See also Long line (telecommunications)
2. In the military community, communications among users on a national or worldwide basis.
→ ATM for carriage of a complete range of user traffic, including voice, data, and video signals.
→ ATM provides functionality that is similar to both circuit switching and packet switching networks.
→ ATM uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and encodes data into small, fixed-sized packets (ISO-OSI frames) called cells.
→ ATM uses a connection-oriented model in which a virtual circuit must be established between two endpoints before the actual data exchange begins.
