System and method for eliminating jitter by using a starve/inspect approach to AAL1

This invention relates to the field of telephony using ATM networks and more particularly to techniques for processing telephony signals communicated over ATM networks using ATM Adaptation Layer (AAL ) telephony. A system and method for transporting telephony signals across an ATM network using AAL1 while eliminating the jitter associated with the AAL1 cells. The present invention uses starve/inspect techniques to dynamically buffer the ATM frames such that jitter associated with the cells can be reduced while avoiding unneeded buffering that would cause excessive delay.