A method for reducing overall delay, distortion and noise during the transfer of packetized data over a telecommunications network of the type including a transport medium and a plurality of items of network equipment interconnected via virtual connections for transporting packetized data to and from network nodes, comprising the steps:
- deploying in the network items of network equipment that have been certified for compliance with a common set of national and international standards and for operation under common network-to-network interface protocol relationships;
- and maintaining a set of software interface modules for each equipment vendor, each software interface module providing an application programming interface hook for each network function that can be implemented or reacted on the network via an open architecture application protocol interface associated with each item of network equipment.