present invention shall be described herein for illustrative purposes with reference to asynchronous transfer mode atm packets cells see e g atm forum af vmoa 0145 af uni 0010 af tm 0121 etc www atmforum com international telecommunication union itu t recommendations 1 361 1 362 1 363 1 364 etc nevertheless one of ordinary skill the art would readily recognize that the principles of the present invention could be extended to other packet formats and protocols u2014 such as those defined in the multi protocol label switching mpls architecture see e g e rosen et al u201c multiprotocol label switching architecture u201d internet engineering task force request for comments rfc 3031 january 2001 the packets are forwarded to the ilec lso 210 by the tngdlc remote terminal 230 through some advantageous transport medium 241 e g the tngdlc remote terminal 230 can take advantage of existing optical transport mechanisms connecting prior art digital remote terminals and use the existing optical transceivers and fiber optic transport facilities to exchange the digital packets with the ilec lso 210 at the central office 210 the ilec maintains a packet node 211 illustratively an atm module in fig2 which is advantageously configured to forward the packets in accordance with the particular nature of the packet stream for example consider the situation where the ilec provides conventional telephony services through a prior art class 5 switch 215 at the central office 210 e g a lucent 5ess u00a9 switch packet flows associated with an ilec telephony subscriber are identified and forwarded by the packet node 211 to a packet voice gateway 212 which converts the packet streams into a format appropriate for the central office switch 215 e g into time division multiplexed tdm signals.