Abstract
Advance in digital signal processing and telecommunication technologies has lead to the development of ATM and B-ISDN. Satellite communications systems can play an important role in the development of the initial experimental systems and also in the fully developed networks due to their features of flexible wide coverage, independent of ground distances and geographical constrains, multiple access and multipoint broadcast. This paper presents an implementation structure of ATM via satellite and its capabilities of supporting B-ISDN based on a demonstration system developed within the RACE CATALYST project.