If you’re primarily concerned with shuffling low latency voice around the place, and you want to do hardware forwarding on relatively inexpensive silicon, then that cell size is entirely sensible.

That approach of course didn’t age well when voice almost became a niche application.

Thus its acronym, A Technical Mistake. Or, from the telco side, A Tariffing Mechanism.

note that it was 'tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France', most other places had long enough latency anyways that they needed to have it anyways. and of course now everything needs echo cancellation.

I think standards are important, and I'm sad that no one bothers anymore, but stuff like this and the inclusion of interlace in digital video for that little 3 year window when it might have mattered does really sour one on the process.