Abstract: An explicit rate congestion control system and method to support available bit rate service in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks is provided. The system and method observe the maximum usage of different connections and incorporates both rate and queue length information to achieve a stable operation of the ATM network. The control of congestion and fairness is separated which permits the system and method to have a common framework to support multiple fairness criteria. The system and method may operate with switches implementing both aggregate and per connection queuing at their ports. In the method, the number of active connections at a bottleneck node is only used to normalize control and to redistribute spare bandwidth during transient conditions and does not affect the steady state fair rate used by each connection.