Interleaving and fastpath
ISPs (rarely, users) have the option to use interleaving of packets to counter the effects of burst noise on the telephone line. An interleaved line has a depth, usually 8 to 64, which describes how many ATM packets are accumulated before they are sent. As they can all be sent together, their forward error correction codes can be made more resilient. Interleaving adds latency as all the packets have to first be gathered (or replaced by empty packets) and they, of course, all take time to transmit. 8 frame interleaving adds 5 ms round-trip-time (RTT), while 64 deep interleaving adds 25 ms RTT. Other possible depths are 16 and 32.
"Fastpath" connections have an interleaving depth of 1, that is one packet is sent at a time. This has a low latency, usually around 10 ms (interleaving adds to this, this is not greater than interleaved) but it extremely prone to errors, as any burst of noise can take out the entire packet and so require it all to be retransmitted. Such a burst on a large interleaved packet only blanks part of the packet, it can be recovered from error correction information in the rest of the packet. A "fastpath" connection will result in extremely high latency on a poor line, as each packet will take many retries.